Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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DECOCTION OF DANDELION
Boil 4 ounces of bruised dandelion in 1½ pints of distilled water, to a pint, and strain. Used in torpid conditions of the liver, jaundice, habitual constipation, etc. Dose: 2 or 3 ounces, 2 or 3 times a day.
A sick-room preparation rather than a kitchen one, but it is simply a strong dandelion tisane and can be read as such. The medical claims attached to it belong to 1900, not to current practice.
- Which part of the plantNineteenth-century pharmacy meant the root when it wrote dandelion in a decoction — Taraxacum officinale, dug in autumn. Leaves are infused, not boiled; roots are the ones bruised and simmered.
- "Bruised"Crushed or pounded to split the tissue and release the sap, not chopped fine. A rolling pin or the flat of a heavy knife on cleaned, trimmed root does it.
- 4 ounces is by weightThat is a substantial quantity — roughly 115 g. Whether the book means fresh root or dried is not stated, and the difference is large, since drying removes most of the root's water.
- PintsIf the book is American, its pint is the 16-ounce one, so 1½ pints is 24 fl oz (about 700 ml), reduced by simmering to 16 fl oz (about 475 ml). Read as imperial, the volumes rise by a fifth.
- Distilled waterPresumably specified because distilled water was the standard vehicle in pharmacy of the period, ordinary municipal and well water varying in mineral content and purity. Filtered or bottled water is the modern equivalent; nothing in the extraction requires distilled.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, which at the stated dose is two to four days' worth. There is no sugar, alcohol or acid in it, so it is a perishable vegetable broth — refrigerate and discard after two or three days.
- TasteIntensely bitter and earthy, closer to a bitter vegetable stock than to tea. Roasted dandelion root, sold as a coffee substitute, is the same material treated to soften that bitterness.
- The claimsTorpid liver, jaundice and habitual constipation are period diagnoses, and this is not a treatment for any of them. Dandelion is a mild diuretic with a long folk record; anyone on diuretics, lithium or blood-pressure medication, or sensitive to the daisy family, should leave it alone.
Dandelion was official medicine, not folklore, when this book was printed: Taraxacum appeared in the United States Pharmacopoeia through much of the nineteenth century, and decoctions, extracts and fluid extracts of the root were stocked by druggists as bitter tonics and "deobstruents" for the liver. The plant's reputation is written into its names — the French pissenlit records the diuretic effect plainly, while dandelion comes through French dent de lion, lion's tooth, for the jagged leaf. This volume is of a kind often said to have served the sick-room as well as the kitchen: the same book that told a cook how to bone a turkey told her how to prepare gruels, barley waters and simple decoctions for the invalid upstairs. The theory behind this one — that a sluggish or "torpid" liver caused constipation, sallowness and low spirits, and could be roused with bitters — was standard medicine of the era and has not survived it.