Sarsaparilla was a common commercial drink in Singapore during my childhood. We called it sarsi for short. It’s similar in flavour to root beer and coke.
Whenever we were developing a sore throat, we’d chill some sarsi, then add salt, and drink it. I suspect it’s the salt bit that works for the sore throat, and the sarsi is there to make it more palatable. (Ditto other Chinese herbal remedies using supporting ingredients to make the main ingredient more drinkable — to be covered in another blog.)
In the UK, I haven’t been able to track down sarsi, so I’d use coke as an alternative. If I think I might be going down with a sore throat, I’d get the largest bottle of coke I can find, then drink a portion, with salt, every few hours.
Some might say it’s not healthy to be pumping one’s system up with so much salt, but this formula is only for zapping a sore throat quickly when one is threatening to erupt, which is not that often — in my case, once every few years, if not decade. You can actually feel the bubbles of the fizzy liquid attacking the inflamed walls of your throat as it goes down your gullet. It also works even when the sore throat has taken hold.
(Singapore / London, 1960s / 1977 onwards)
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