Giving ‘kill or cure’ a whole different meaning!

Husband has retired to bed with a whisky and an imminent cold, hoping the first will delay the latter. By chance I was looking in an fifty year old recipe book and was looking at a pen and ink drawing of yarrow, and saw there was a recipe for cough mixture on the opposite page. Rest assured I will not be giving it to him, even if I had the ingredients:

• ½ lb black treacle
• one pennyworth aniseed
• one pennyworth peppermint
• one pennyworth laudanum
• one pennyworth paregoric
• one pennyworth ante-monieum wine

If you want to try this you boil the black treacle in one and a half pints of water, then cool and add everything else. Laudanum is a tincture of poppy seed – otherwise known as opium; paregoric (now banned) is “a mixture of opium powder (anhydrous morphine, 0.4 mg/ml) and ethanol. Other ingredients include benzoic acid, camphor, and anise oil”, and I think ante-monieum wine is made with antimony, a toxic, metallic element! This recipe gives ‘kill or cure’ a whole different meaning!

On the next page are two more recipes – one starts well with egg-white, a wine-glassful of whisky and a tablespoon of lemon juice, sweetened with glycerine. The second one  starts in a promising manner with a pound of treacle, two ounces of Spanish juice (is this wine? Is this Sangria? I have no idea!) oil of aniseed – and then guess what? Laudanum, of course, and glycerine to sweeten it.

Husband’s far better off with a book about Elvis Presley and a glass of whisky (Jim Beam Black Cherry) I will join him later with a glass of red and continue reading about Licoricia of Winchester (an extraordinary  thirteenth century Jewish business woman)