Now is the time, Outdoor Cooks, to drive around and locate your wood for smokin’ meats for the next year!

Several years ago we put together an outdoor cookbook for a Southern outdoor writer organization that I was president of then, which was called Outdoor Tables & Tales. It was successful beyond our dreams, and still sells well.

If you’d like an autographed copy from your Uncle Bob, send $20 + $2 shipping to me at P.O. Box 6, Stoneville, MS 38776.  Also works for my books The Jakes ($28), The Barefoot Dodgers ($25), and Don’t Fish Under The Dingleberry Tree ($20), as well.

Howsomever, this ain’t a column to sell books.  This is a column to tell you to go drive the rural roads and locate a sassafras thicket!

Back when I was just a shirttail boy, the grownups would send me to dig sassafras roots for sassafras tea.  

This tea was considered to be “good for what ails you,” and I grew up enjoying the taste of it, hot and sweetened with honey, which we called back then “long sweetening,” along with “sog’gum ‘lasses.”  

I’d dig down and expose the shallow running roots of the sassafras saplings, clip off the above-ground part with the shovel edge, and bring a sackful of the roots back home where Momma would wash them and toss them on top of the refrigerator to dry.  

To prepare the tea, she’d just boil water, then carve off shavings of sassafras roots into the teapot, pour boiling water over them, and let it steep for fifteen minutes or so. Sweetened with honey and served hot, it’s an excellent drink, even if it is “good for what ails you.”

As a man, I ain’t much good on Inside Cooking, although I do boil Slung Coffee in our kitchen every morning of the world.

Slung Coffee is more properly prepared outside, of course, where there are no kitchen counters, chairs, sinks, etc, to impede the slinging action, which settles the grounds by centrifugal force.  

Once I’d repainted the kitchen a couple of times after making coffee, I learned that one could also settle the grounds with eggwhites and shells, or by simply running a cup of cold water down the spout of the coffeepot. I also can scramble up what Adam used to call “Green Eggs” (he was colorblind) with Worchestershire and Tabasco, but that about does it for my Inside Cooking Talents.

But I can hold my own in any Outside Cooking Contest, and have won awards for my shish-ka-Bob ducks and rabbits, pork loin, barbecued bananas, and campfire peaches.

I consider myself an expert on smoking wild or tame turkeys, as well as venison haunches. On these latter entrees, get ready, because I am fixing to reveal unto you the secret: it’s sassafras wood!

I used to use hickory, which is nowadays somewhat hard to come by in the Delta, but once when I was smoking a turkey, found that I had run out of hickory. I scouted around for some substitute, and saw those dried sassafras roots on top of the refrigerator, thinking, “Well, that’s a real aromatic wood; wonder how sassafras will work to smoke with?”

I never went back to hickory.

We’ve recently had our first frost, and every sassafras thicket in the South just jumps out at you, when you drive around and look for it.  

It’s a beautiful burnt orange color, unlike the ubiquitous red of poison oak or sumac, but blending beautifully into fall foliage with those two, as well as the bright yellow of the big persimmon leaves. I don’t dig the roots for smoking wood, though, having found that the saplings work just as well, and they can be clipped off with any lopping shears you have for yard work.

Gather a pickup load now, because once you have tried even hamburgers grilled over sassafras, you ain’t going back to whatever type inferior wood you had been using before. It doesn’t work as well for steaks or something you are grilling quickly, which doesn’t give the smoke time to work.

Don’t say you never got anything worthwhile from your Uncle Bob!