I love reading the strange things people used to eat, wear as perfume, or prescribe as medicine. Recipes do not have to be proven useless or useful, just have to be bizarre. Example: A popular way of brightening the eyes (supposedly) in the 19th century was to eat eau de cologne on a lump of sugar. See here.
I fail to understand the pun? Also, this post: http://tablematters.com/2013/10/02/beef-tea-for-the-soul/
Also I love those old recipes. Do wonder if the author didn´t maybe overestimate how useful the stuff was supposed to be for curing the illness though, and if it wasn´t maybe just meant as something to feed the sick person most of the time.
Mince half an onion, or one smal one. Put into a mug, cover with honey, fill up with milk, nuke in the microwave for a minute. Eat/drink. Works good against a sore throat. (Family recipe)
Honey is good at coating the throat and is a mild antiseptic. Milk similarly coats and soothes but can increase phlegm so if youve got a runny nose its better to swap it out for lemon. I cannot for the life of me figure out what the onions do and they sound nasty as hell.
when i was surly or mopey (which was fairly often) my mother used to make me 'cambric tea'. basically, half milk and half boiling water, with a couple spoons of sugar. she got the habit from her mother, who got it from her mother, and presumably so on back to when a bunch of stone age celts got tired of drinking yesterday's cow juice cold and had some extra honey to get rid of, idk. i don't think she consciously believed that it was a cure for childhood depression or whatever. it was just a habit, like saying 'bless you' when someone sneezes. or maybe more like not letting your kid watch tv when they're home sick from school, because back when tv was first invented it was so very exciting that a sick kid actually would get themselves worked up and end up sicker? whereas by my childhood it was just a weird 'because i said so' rule. cambric tea was like that. an obstreporous, belligerent mini-jesse who kept picking on his baby brother for no reason and would burst into tears when scolded, if you let him have soda or chocolate milk or basically anything he actually wanted to drink, surely that would make his tiny temper worse! whereas cambric tea will soothe him and make him nice again. why? because. that being the case, i find it vaguely offensive that... it actually worked. every time. :/
Dunno if strange enough, but take 1 eggyolk and ~2spoons of sugar in a mug, stir 'till foamy, give it to child!me.
My mother said they used to eat something like that as a candy sort of thing as kids, but it´s no longer done because of risk of salmonella.
