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Chamomile Tea as a Strengthener
Use one pint of boiling water to about thirty chamomile flowers. Steep, strain, sweeten with honey or sugar, and drink a cupful half an hour before breakfast, to promote digestion and restore the action of the liver. A teacupful of the tea, in which has been stirred a full dessert-spoonful of sugar and a very little ginger, is an excellent tonic and stimulant for an old person, taken two hours before dinner.
A plain infusion, and the quantities work as given once you know what "thirty chamomile flowers" amounts to. The medical claims attached to it are period pharmacy, not fact.
- Flowers by weightThirty dried chamomile heads is roughly a tablespoon to a tablespoon and a half of loose flowers, or about 2-3 g. That is one to two supermarket teabags per pint (2 cups) of water.
- German or RomanThe book means the small daisy-like heads of either Matricaria recutita (German chamomile) or Chamaemelum nobile (Roman chamomile). German is what almost all modern loose tea and teabags contain and is the milder of the two; Roman is noticeably more bitter.
- Steeping timeNo time is given. Five minutes covered is standard; ten minutes or more turns it bitter and astringent without adding much aroma. Cover the cup or pot while it steeps, since most of the scent leaves with the steam.
- Water off the boilThe recipe says boiling water, which is the usual instruction for a herbal infusion. Some prefer to let the kettle stand off the heat for half a minute, on the grounds that a full rolling boil drives off some of the delicate apple-like aroma.
- A dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon in period usage, usually reckoned at about two teaspoons. "A very little ginger" means a pinch of dried ground ginger, an eighth of a teaspoon or so.
- YieldOne pint gives two to three teacupfuls. The recipe does not say whether the two doses are meant to come from a single batch. Chamomile infusion does not keep well; make it fresh rather than reheating.
- The claimsChamomile is a pleasant, mildly sedative herbal tea. It does not "restore the action of the liver," and nothing here should stand in for medical treatment. Chamomile is also in the daisy family, so anyone reacting badly to ragweed or related plants may react to it.
Chamomile was among the herbs a nineteenth-century household is often said to have kept on hand as much for the medicine chest as for the teapot. The name comes through Latin from Greek chamaimelon, "ground apple," for the scent of the crushed flowers. Its reputation as a bitter tonic taken before eating belongs to a long tradition in which aromatic bitters were thought to rouse a sluggish digestion and liver, and the ginger-and-sugar version here follows the same logic that produced gentian and wormwood tonics: warmth and bitterness to "stimulate" the elderly or convalescent. The dosing language, a cupful half an hour before breakfast, two hours before dinner, is the giveaway that this was copied out of a domestic medicine tradition rather than a cookery one.