Cooking a recipe that calls for parsley, I won’t hesitate to substitute for tarragon or chives–if I’m out of parsley that is. Similarly, I might resort to brown sugar because molasses is nowhere to be found in the depths of my pantry. We can rely on those common ingredients, the ones we can’t seem to get rid of, to stand in for the rarer, so long as they have the same basic purpose in the dish. Parsley, tarragon, and chives all bring fresh herbal notes and molasses and brown sugar endow a dish with sweet richness. But what if the ingredient you’re missing has a nearly inimical character to it? How can you substitute yeast in bread, or salt in pickles? Such is the scenario of the tired American in times of war. Caffeine-starved due to broken supply chains and forced to forage in her own backyard for the one ingredient that packs a punch, she brews cassina, the traditional stimulant of the Southeastern indigenous peoples.
Cassina is known by several names, among them Cassina (also Cassena), Yaupon (also Yoppon), te del indio, and Black Drink. It is an infusion, really a tea, brewed from the dried or roasted leaves of the Yaupon or Dahoon Holly native to the Southeastern United States. These species of holly grow along the coast line from North Carolina all the way to Texas and withstand a fair amount of inhospitable environmental factors, most notably salt from the ocean and sandy soil. They cannot, however, live in the cold, thus their geographical range is abruptly cut off.
Botanically unique from other native North American hollies, these species are the only naturally occurring holly to contain caffeine on the continent (Hudson 5). This fact is particularly impressive considering that indigenous peoples have been using it to brew ritual and stimulating beverages for a long time. On top of this, the people who originally populated the Southeast States had discovered the most efficient manner to extract caffeine from these leaves–that is to roast the leaves to make the caffeine soluble in water, as well as to drink the brew hot to increase the body’s uptake of the stimulating molecule (Hudson 6).
The Muskogee, Catawba, and others drank “black drink” or yaupon tea just as we drink tea or coffee today. Firstly, they drank it as a physical and social stimulant, leveraging the active ingredient caffeine. Secondly, they consumed it medicinally, to treat ailments. Finally, the most frequently cited use of the drink, and perhaps the least common, they used it as a ceremonial emetic. (Hudson 5) This last use has been written about and speculated upon by many western observers and has even led to the Yaupon holly’s scientific name, Ilex Vomitoria. The truth is that these leaves will not make you puke anymore than coffee or tea will, although chugging hot water might.
In addition to daily use, the drink was ritually important to most indigenous men as a purifying draught. The drink was, to make no exaggeration, a men’s drink. Ethnographers have speculated that one of the tea’s social purposes was actually to differentiate between men and women. Men would drink cassina before meetings, women would not. On top of this, purifying was important to traditional society in the region. Certain foods were pure and others were impure. Food made by menstruating women or food regularly consumed by animals had a connotation of impurity to it. (Hudson 5). In order to re-purify the body, a man had to consume the infusion of holly leaves. Perhaps the use of the tea as an emetic also had to do with purification.
Yet, when the Europeans arrived, laden with tea among other things, cassina lost its importance and the beverage became a provincial specialty of Spanish Florida (where colonists called it te del indio) and the Carolina region. (Hudson 6). Tea, and eventually coffee, dominated the palate of American bibulous life while yaupon, quite frankly, was never in favor for Europeans or their descendants. The poor who lived in yaupon-growing regions in the Carolinas were the only Europeans to regularly consume the drink (Africans as slaves were brought over and discovered the stimulating drink as well). For this reason, America has only ever acknowledged that it has tea literally growing in its back yard during times of caffeine scarcity. Those are times when tea and coffee cannot make it to the continent–in other words, during times of war.
Since the time Europeans first arrived in Yaupon growing regions, colonists drank tea made from the holly’s leaves. Spanish likely drank te del indio in 1500s Florida, and early American colonists of the south did the same. The drink was already emblematic of southern living by the time the Revolutionary War broke out between England and the colonies. A 1791 poem published in Philadelphia’s National Gazette patronizes the South as it describes a Northerner staying in a Southern inn. One verse reads:
Discourag’d at so vile a treat,
Yet pleas’d to see the early dawn
In haste we left this dismal place
Nor stay’d to drink their dear Yoppon
On how terrible a Carolinan inn was
(National Gazette (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)November 7, 1791)
Yaupon (here Yoppon) is already strongly associated with the Carolinas and has a signature low class connotation from the Northerners perspective.
Nevertheless, patriotic Americans everywhere were made aware of Yaupon tea as the war with Britain ramped up. One 1822 retrospective on the Revolutionary War suggests that after the levying of the Tea Act and the resulting Boston Tea Party, tea from Britain was considered unpatriotic (sort of like the replacement of the word frankfurter during WWI). Patriots boycotted the tea and looked for substitutes including the caffeinated infusion made from roasted holly leaves. (From the Trenton True American. Recollections of Past Times and Events Essex Register (Salem, Massachusetts)August 7, 1822). This same sentiment was echoed in an 1802 editorial that encouraged heavy duties be laid on foreign tea in order to “bring Yoppon Tea into Use [sic]” (The following Was Received Sometime Ago, but through Accident Was Mislaid. for the Spy Federal Spy (Springfield, Massachusetts)June 29, 1802.) At the time of the war, only colonists in southern states, where Yaupon holly grew natively, would have known about and consumed Cassina. The war, however, led to tensions with the tea trading capital of the world, Britain, and thus led to at least some speculation that an American substitute could be found.
The Civil War saw another great disruption in the availability of tea and coffee, but particularly in Southern states which had limited access to rail transportation and were under northern embargo. The Confederate Army and the inhabitants of the states in the South simply turned to yaupon to sate their need for a hot drink. This was perhaps not so great a change for some peoples living in the Confederacy as many Carolinans were accustomed and even proud of the tea.
In the wake of World War I, the US government seriously considered Yaupon tea as a potential competitor to tea and coffee. The Bureau of Chemistry, then housed beneath the Department of Agriculture and later to become the FDA, declared “the plant offers great possibilities in producing a drink rivalling tea and coffee in bouquet, palatability and stimulating quality.” (Bureau of Chemistry Seeks New Beverage Miami Herald (published as The Miami Herald) (Miami, Florida)July 2, 1922) The Department of Agriculture even pursued experimental farms in the Carolinas to test the feasibility of their project.
This experiment came on the heels of both war-time food shortages and the blossoming of industrial food production. Yaupon had never been farmed commercially; it just grew bountifully in the wild. Nevertheless, modern Americans perceived that “the raw material grows in immense quantity. It is manufactured easily and cheaply by machinery, and its products all carry high quality and the taste for them does not need acquiring.” (Common Sense Comment Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia)November 21, 1922) The experiment did not pan out in any meaningful way.
Finally, during the Second World War, the Bureau of Agriculture released a report stating:
“Diminishing supplies of coffee and tea, resulting from wartime interruption of international trade, have revived interest in the native cassina plant as a possible source of a table beverage. About 20 years ago scientists in the Bureau of Chemistry investigated the cassina plant and experimented on methods for cutting cassina leaves and preparing from them beverages and a flavoring extract.”
Without fail, whenever the most popular sources of caffeine disappear from the general stores of America, we remember that we have tea that grows here. Why has this tea never achieved any commercial success? We have no idea.
The American Cassina plant as the source of a table beverage, United States Bureau of Agricultural and Industrial Chemistry, 1943. https://archive.org/details/americancassinap11unit/page/n3/mode/2up
Hudson, Charles M. Black Drink : a Native American Tea. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979.
Smith Barton, Benjamin. Elements of botany, or, outlines of the natural history of vegetables. 1812
“Common Sense Comment.” Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia)November 21, 1922
“Bureau of Chemistry Seeks New Beverage.” Miami Herald (published as The Miami Herald) (Miami, Florida)July 2, 1922
“From the Trenton True American. Recollections of Past Times and Events.” Essex Register (Salem, Massachusetts)August 7, 1822
“Matte, or Paraguay Tea. Supposed To Exist In North Carolina.” Charleston Courier (Charleston, South Carolina)May 26, 1856
National Gazette (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)November 7, 1791
“Spurious Substitutes.” Cincinnati Daily Gazette (Cincinnati, Ohio)June 10, 1873
“The following Was Received Sometime Ago, but through Accident Was Mislaid for the Spy.” Federal Spy (Springfield, Massachusetts)June 29, 1802
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