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Salep referring to both orchid as well as the salep drink. It is a flour made from grinding the dried tubers of various species of orchid, which contain a nutritious starch-like polysaccharide called bassorin.
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Details
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The drug known as Salep was used to be made from the dried tubers of several species of Orchis and related genera such as the Anacamptis pyramidalis. Botanical Source and History of Salep: - Formerly, the tubers derived from Eulophia campestris and E. herbacea, Lindley, and related species, growing in Persia and the Levant, constituted the drug salep. South and central Europe now furnish salep, and the only kinds admitted in the German Pharmacopoeia are those unbranched tubers derived from Orchis mascula, Orchis ustulata, Orchis Morio, Platanthera bifolia, Anacamptis pyramidalis and other related species. The tubers are gathered, scalded, and dried quickly, which process removes their bitterness and disagreeable odour, as well as renders them somewhat translucent. The Oriental salep is less translucent than that from European dark in colour. Among other species, the Orchis masculata, Orchis latifolia, Orchis sambucina, and Gymnadaenia conopsea furnish the fattened, palmately-divided tubers, having 3 to 5 divisions. They resemble the commercial grades, excepting that they contain less mucilage. They were once called Radix Palmae Christi. Description and Chemical Composition. - European salep is never so large as Oriental salep, which ranges from 1 to 1 3/5 inches in length, ovoid, oval, oblong, or pyriform, more or less flattened and corrugated, and marked at the apex with a terminal bud-scar. It is yellowish and translucent, hard, and horn-like, and without odour, but has a mucilaginous and somewhat insipid taste. In commerce it occurs mostly as a yellowish powder. The chief constituents of salep, according to Dragendorff (1865), are mucilage (48 per cent), starch (27 per cent), albuminous bodies (5 per cent), etc. The mucilage of salep is soluble in cold water, this solution being precipitated by alcohol, and by basic lead acetate.
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