Deep Dive: Spilanthes

There’s a single small yellow flower, native to the Amazon, that somehow ended up doing the exact same job on two completely different continents. It was discovered by two groups of people who never once made contact with each other, who were separated by an entire ocean and, in some estimates, thousands of years.

In the Amazon basin, Indigenous communities in what's now Brazil chewed the raw flower heads of spilanthes for a specific, practical reason: numbing oral pain, soothing sore throats, and getting the mouth to flood with saliva when it needed to. The plant became a genuine staple of daily life, not just an emergency remedy. The leaves were cooked as a salted green, flower heads chewed the way someone today might reach for a piece of gum, stems used to freshen breath on an ordinary afternoon. It was the same casual, everyday relationship most people today have with a stick of gum or a breath mint. That's the origin of the plant's oldest and plainest English name, the toothache plant. It’s a description of exactly what it does, coined by early European botanists, who were translating what they were told by the people who'd been using it for generations already, long before any of those botanists had a chemical explanation for why it worked.

Centuries later, colonial trade routes carried the plant across the Indian Ocean, and Ayurvedic practitioners in South Asia independently folded it into their own medicine under the name Akarkara. They used it for dental decay, fevers, rheumatism, and, in some formulations, as part of vitality tonics meant to restore energy to people recovering from long illness. Practitioners sometimes combined it with warming spices already common in the Ayurvedic pharmacy, like ginger, black pepper, and saffron, building an entirely separate tradition around the same molecule, with its own logic and its own vocabulary. There's no evidence anyone in the Amazon and anyone in India ever compared notes or shared text, but nobody needed to. The plant announces its own function within seconds of being chewed, obviously enough that two separate healing traditions, oceans apart, arrived at the same conclusion entirely on their own, working from nothing but their own mouths as evidence. They didn’t require a laboratory or shared information. Just practical experimentation.

Its more recent names tell a completely different, much more modern story, that is more about marketing than medicine. You'll often hear it called a Sichuan button, but the plant has no actual connection to Sichuan, China, at all — it doesn't grow there, and it was never used there historically. Western distributors and chefs coined that name because the numbing sensation resembles the málà effect of true Sichuan peppercorn, a completely unrelated plant from a different continent, which borrows a familiar reference point to sell an unfamiliar flower. Buzz buttons and electric daisy are newer still, terms that emerged specifically during the molecular gastronomy boom of the 2000s, when high-end kitchens and bars started selling the plant's shock value as an experience in itself, packaged and branded the way any new product would be, complete with a wink toward the theatrics chefs and bartenders knew the sensation itself could provide.

One older nickname deserves a mention too, mostly because it's stranger than any of the modern branding: some of the plant's oldest colloquial names in the Americas translate roughly to eyeball plant, a reference to the flower head itself, which doesn't look like a daisy at all up close. It's a dense yellow cone that narrows into a dark red spot right at the tip, closer to a small compound eye than anything botanical people usually associate with a flower.

None of that history explains what's actually happening on a chemical level to earn four completely different names for the same small flower.

The compound responsible is spilanthol, a fatty acid amide that penetrates the mucous membranes of the mouth almost instantly on contact. It works in two distinct phases, which is exactly why the sensation itself changes character over roughly thirty seconds rather than hitting all at once. First, spilanthol activates two specific nerve receptors, TRPA1 and TRPV1, the same class the body normally uses to detect sharp mechanical pain and extreme temperature. That triggers a rapid burst of nerve signaling that the brain doesn't register as flavor at all, but as an electric buzz, or a rhythmic, vibrating jolt some people describe as licking a low-voltage battery. Almost immediately after that initial buzz peaks, spilanthol blocks voltage-gated sodium channels in those same nerve fibers, which is the identical basic mechanism synthetic anesthetics like lidocaine rely on to work, just arrived at from a completely different source. That shift is what produces the numbness that reliably follows the buzz, the tingling giving way to something closer to a dental injection, minus the needle and the hour of drooling afterward that a real one leaves behind. Researchers studying taste cells directly have also found that spilanthol interferes with potassium channels in those same cells, a separate mechanical effect that helps explain the specific, buzzing quality of the sensation, distinct from a simple flavor or a simple burn.

A 2016 study out of the University of Campinas in Brazil, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, developed an oral film using real spilanthes extract and tested its anesthetic performance directly against EMLA cream, a clinical-grade lidocaine and prilocaine anesthetic already used in real dental practice for exactly this purpose. The results were genuinely comparable, with a plant folk remedy going head to head with an actual pharmaceutical standard and holding its own, tested with the same rigor any new synthetic anesthetic candidate would face before ever reaching a patient's mouth.

There's a safety detail worth mentioning, though, since it's a real, current, institutional caution. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's own patient-facing herb database specifically warns that animal studies show spilanthes stimulates male hormone production at high doses, and advises patients being treated for prostate cancer to avoid it entirely, since it may interfere with hormone-based treatment protocols. The same research notes mild blood-thinning properties too, worth knowing if you're already taking a prescribed anticoagulant.

The same intensity that earns a genuine medical caution is exactly what makes this plant such a reliable showpiece behind a bar or in a kitchen, and it has been for longer than most people realize.

In Pará, Brazil, spilanthes, known locally as jambu, is a genuine point of regional identity, instead of just a folk remedy tucked away in old herbals somewhere. It's a prominent ingredient in the food served during Círio de Nazaré, one of the largest Catholic religious festivals in the world, drawing millions of pilgrims to Belém each October, where dishes built around jambu leaves, like duck in tucupi and tacacá, sit proudly alongside the region's other iconic foods during weeks of celebration. Tacacá itself is served hot, in a gourd bowl, built on a yellow manioc broth called tucupi, dried shrimp, and a generous handful of jambu leaves stirred in right before serving, so the numbness is still fresh when the first spoonful reaches the tongue. There's also a regional specialty called cachaça de jambu: Brazil's national sugarcane spirit, infused directly with the fresh flower, traditionally sipped slowly enough to let the numbness build gradually against the burn of the alcohol rather than hitting all at once, a pairing locals describe as formigamento da boca, a pleasant tingling of the mouth, as though ants were quietly walking across the tongue.

That same shock value made spilanthes a genuine international phenomenon in high-end food and drink, starting with one of the most influential chefs of the last fifty years. In 2004, Ferran Adrià served it at El Bulli in a dish called Electric Milk, a delicate wafer of dehydrated milk topped with the raw flower, after a Dutch microgreens distributor introduced him to the plant specifically because Adrià was already known worldwide for chasing exactly this kind of sensory surprise in his food.

The clearest example, though, is a single cocktail. The Verbena, created by Mariena Mercer at the Chandelier Bar inside the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas in December of 2010, instructs guests to take a sip of the citrus-forward cocktail, chew a whole spilanthes bud for twenty seconds, and then drink it again. The numbness genuinely changes how the second sip tastes, muting some flavors and sharpening others in a way no amount of stirring or shaking could replicate, turning an ordinary margarita variation into something closer to a two-part experiment than a single drink. It was supposed to stay on the menu for a few months as a seasonal novelty. By April of 2019, the bar had sold nine point four million dollars worth of the drink, and it remains one of the most talked-about cocktails in the entire city, largely by word of mouth alone, in a town built almost entirely on things designed specifically to be talked about.

The form matters almost as much as the flower itself. A whole fresh bud, the way the Verbena serves it, delivers the sensation at full strength and on full display — real theater, chewed at the table, and gone in under a minute. That immediacy comes at a cost, though: the fresh flower loses potency fast once picked, which is exactly why most producers making anything shelf-stable rely on tincture or extract instead, made by steeping fresh buds in alcohol, typically at something close to a one-to-one ratio. Herbalists who work with the plant regularly all give the same advice regardless of format: start with far less than seems necessary, and add more only if the first dose doesn't land, since a heavy hand turns a playful buzz into an unpleasant one fast.

A family in Colorado took the same idea and built an entire spirit around it from scratch. Bob and Susan Tews started growing spilanthes at home after watching Anthony Bourdain encounter the flower on a trip to Brazil on television. They spent years developing a formula in their own kitchen using nothing more sophisticated than store-bought vodka and homegrown flowers, testing early batches on friends at parties before ever approaching a real distillery, and eventually launched Tingala Spirits in 2016. They created a liqueur built entirely around the plant's tingling effect, now sold across several states to drinkers who've never heard of jambu, Akarkara, or any of the plant's other names. This allows anyone to encounter the exact same sensation Amazonian healers and Ayurvedic practitioners identified independently, centuries apart, poured into a cocktail glass instead of chewed straight off the stem.

An ingredient isn't just a flavor. In fact, sometimes it isn't a flavor at all. It's a physical sensation, real enough to require a hospital-grade warning label and rigorous enough to hold its own against actual pharmaceutical anesthetics in a real lab. Once you've felt it yourself, it stops being strange that people on opposite sides of the world, working centuries apart, all reached for the exact same small yellow flower.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes return this fall — follow now to catch Season 2.