When I lived in the Middle East, there was a warm drink we enjoyed called sahlab (spelled with variations in different countries, such as salep in Turkey) that is made from dried powdered orchid roots and milk. It can be sweetened, flavored with rosewater and sprinkled with cinnamon and finely chopped pistachios. The powder made from the roots was ubiquitous in markets in my country, but is hard to find here. I don’t know which kinds of orchids are used traditionally. Do all orchids have tubers that are edible (or drinkable)? Are there Pacific Northwest native orchids that could substitute for the wild orchids used in Middle Eastern sahlab?
The use of orchid tubers, whose stored starches are nourishing both to the orchid plant and to humans, goes back many centuries, and over time, sahlab/salep in one form or another migrated across Europe. In the Middle East, people typically use tubers from wild native orchids. In Israel, the family Orchidaceae is referred to as Sahlavim [plural], and the genus Orchis is called Sahlav. In Greece and Turkey, the drink is often made from the tubers of Orchis mascula, Orchis militaris and Anacamptis morio. Other sources include Dactylorhiza and Ophrys species. By the 18th century England, salep or ‘saloop’ was made from Orchis mascula, and was sold by street vendors as a lower cost alternative to tea and coffee. It also went by the name ‘dogstones’ because of the tubers’ resemblance to testicles. In his 1640 book Theatrum Botanicum, John Parkinson lamented that “our pharmacists are wont to adjudge every sort of orchid root an aphrodisiac,” possibly a throwback to the notion that a plant’s appearance indicates its medicinal uses (the Doctrine of Signatures).
An important consideration is the conservation status of some orchids, including species which have been harvested for making sahlab. CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, restricts importing all orchids, because of the difficulty in distinguishing one from another, especially by looking at tubers alone. This may account for the scarcity of sahlab powder.
Many orchids have edible properties–just think of vanilla, made from the pods of Vanilla planifolia. It is hard to say which locally native orchids have tubers best suited to making sahlab, and harvesting wild orchids is problematic from a conservation standpoint. For clues about edible uses of orchids in this country, I
searched the Native American Ethnobotany Database. Numerous tribes (including some in the Pacific Northwest) have used a wide variety of orchid species for edible, medicinal, and spiritual purposes. Those which grow here include: Corallorhiza maculata, Goodyera oblongifolia, Platanthera dilatata, Platanthera stricta, and Spiranthes species. Goodyera, for example, is mentioned in Erna Gunther’s Ethnobotany of Western Washington as a tonic among the Cowlitz.
Rather than try to find or grow and harvest orchids to make your own sahlab, the best thing would be to look for prepared sahlab powder that is made from sustainable sources.
Excerpt: “Salep can be produced sustainably, and the species of orchids that yield the best salep (Orchis mascula, Orchis militaris and Anacamptis morio) can be cultivated. Local propagation and sustainable cultivation alleviate harvesting pressure on wild orchids but subsequent trade poses challenges in the context of national and international legislation, such as CITES.”