There's a Middle Eastern spice combination that a local restaurant floats in olive oil as a bread dip. Za'atar is a combination of ingredients mostly very familiar to me, salt, thyme, sesame seeds and oregano, and one that surprised me, sumac.
Sumac in my mind always has the word poison in front of it; poison sumac, poison ivy and poison oak are all bushes whose oils can cause welts of pain and itching to the skin of many people. Unfortunately, as a native Californian, I have been intimately familiar with poison oak, but I learned quickly as child, how to spot my enemy in all its seasonal guises.
Although I've read that some Native Americans of California nibbled at young poison oak shoots and I know that currently there are homeopathic preparations of titrated poison oak to teach the body to defend itself against the plant irritants, I wasn't so sure that I wanted to eat sumac on my bread. But then I reminded myself that I didn't really know for a fact what exactly it was I was eating.
I found a small commercially packaged box of sumac at a store but the supplier did not identify the substance beyond its common name. The ingredients simply read "ground sumac berries." At least I had learned what part of sumac I'd been eating, but of what kind of sumac ? The trees and plants I know by name I know mostly by their common names. In most realms in life, I often know just enough to know that if I would pay a little closer attention, I might actually know just enough to keep myself out of trouble. I realized I needed the botanical scientific descriptors to find out anymore about "Sumac." Latin isn't really, as some like to say, a dead language, it's just that for the most part it's no longer spoken and therefore doesn't tend to change. Speakers of all languages the world over can refer to species with the same name by using the Latin botanical descriptors.
I found help in my Guide to Field Identification of TREES of North America that I keep handy in the door pocket of my car. SUMAC is quite a big family and as I read about the clan I was in for a few surprises. My tree book reminded me that members of a family are then grouped into Genus and then further grouped into species. So Family, Genus ( always capitalized) and then species ( lower case).
"CASHEW (SUMAC) FAMILY (Anacardiaceae) This family, represented in temperate and tropical regions, comprises about 600 species of trees, shrubs and vines, with resinous, acrid or caustic juices." page 202
The Family includes, to name only a few using their common names:
Mangos in Florida,
California Pepper trees,
Texas Pistachios, Cashews,
Florida Poisontree,
Staghorn Sumac,
Shining Sumac
and yes,
Poison-Sumac.
California Pepper trees,
Texas Pistachios, Cashews,
Florida Poisontree,
Staghorn Sumac,
Shining Sumac
and yes,
Poison-Sumac.
So while poison sumac is indeed in the same family as the sumac used as a spice, it is in a different Genus. The scientific botanical name of the poison oak that had caused me so much itching after childhood jaunts in the hills is Toxicodendron diversilobum, although it used to be referred to as Rhus toxicodendron. Poison-sumac is Toxicodendron vernix and the sumacs that are used to spice food are Rhus coriaria.
So they are different, but they are related...and I did find some minor cautions and lots of other possible health benefits when I searched on the internet using the botanical name, Rhus coriaria. I also learned its common name, Sicillian sumac.
Parables of poison plants and spices tease my mind as I think about local, national and global stages...but I'll keep my promise and let you apply any analogies you might think of, and as always, let me know what you think if you like.
best wishes!
Jeannette
