Cough mixture

I was mentioning old remedies for winter coughs and colds since there seem to be so many around at the moment, and the sort of annoying won’t-go-away sort of petty ailments. I mentioned that Alison Uttley wrote about old remedies she remembered from her country childhood in her delightful little book ‘Recipes From an Old Farmhouse’.

Here is her recipe for Cough Mixture – well-known in cottages:

To a pint and a half of water add a pound of black treacle, two ounces of liquorice and boil for half an hour. Add a pennyworth of paregoric, a pennyworth of aniseed and some oil of peppermint. When cod bottle tightly. One tablespoon every four hours.

Now a pennyworth is rather vague; these days a pennyworth wouldn’t buy you anything, maybe a single aniseed… I did wonder if a pennyworth might equate to a weight, the weight of a penny maybe, but no. Alison Uttley was born in 1884, and as she was writing about a time when she was a child I tried to find out how much a penny then would be worth now… it varied from 35p to £5 depending on what you were buying. So I’ve no idea the quantities.

Then paregoric… what is paregoric… well, it’s camphorated tincture of opium… no wonder they used it in cough mixture – enough of that and you wouldn’t care whether you were coughing or not!