Arrowroot or obedience plant is also known as Maranta Indica, Maranta ramosissima, Maranta Starch or Arrowroot, East or West Indian Arrowroot, Araruta, Bermuda Arrowroot.
Arrowroot is indigenous to the West Indies, where native people, the
Arawaks, used the powder. It is supposed to be a native of South America
also. Purple arrowroot (Canna edulis) has been grown in Queensland. The
arrowroot is just one of many plants that the European settlers and
explorers discovered in the New World. It was introduced into England
about 1732 though it will only grow as a stove plant, with tanners' bark.
It is grown in Bengal, Tava. Philippines, Mauritius. Natal, West Africa.
The plant is naturalized in Florida, but it is chiefly cultivated in the
West Indies (Jamaica and St. Vincent), Australia, Southeast Asia, and
South Africa
The Arawaks used the substance to draw out toxins from people wounded by
poison arrows. Its name is thought to be derived from that practice. The
name may come from the native Caribbean Arawak people's aru-aru (meal of
meals), for which the plant is a staple. Arrowroot is also the name for
the easy-to-digest starch from the rhizomes (rootstock) of West Indian
arrowroot.
The plant is an herbaceous perennial, with a creeping rhizome with
upward-curving. Fleshy, cylindrical tubers covered with large, thin scales
that leave rings of scars. Many of the plants in the arrowroot group are
somewhat similar in appearance.
The flowering stem reaches a height of 6 feet, and bears creamy flowers
at the ends of the slender branches that terminate the long peduncles.
They grow in pairs.
The numerous flat, long, pointed, ovate, glabrous leaves are from 2 to 10
inches in length, with long sheaths often enveloping the stem and attached
in a sheath-like fashion up and down the upright stems in typical canna or
ginger-like fashion.
It is propagated by tubers or suckers planted 6 inches deep and spaced
15 inches apart in furrows 30 inches apart. Arrowroot should be planted at
a time when it will have 10-11 months of hot moist weather to mature. The
starch is extracted from rhizomes not more than a year old.
The roots are dug when they are about a year old. They contain about 23%
starch when cultivated in good condition. They are first washed, then
cleaned and reduced to a pulp. The milky liquid thus obtained is the pure
low-protein mucilaginous starch which is allowed to settle at the bottom
as an insoluble powder. This powder, dried in the sun or in drying houses,
is the "arrowroot" of commerce.
The powder is odorless when dry, but emitting a faint, peculiar odor when
mixed with boiling water, and swelling on cooking into perfect jelly, very
smooth in consistency.
The fecula or starch of the rhizome.
The root contains starch 27.17 per cent, fiber, fat, albumen, sugar, gum, ash, and 62.96 per cent water.