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.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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INFUSION OF CASCARILLA
Macerate 1½ ounces of bruised cascarilla in 1 pint of boiling water for 2 hours, in a covered vessel, and strain. Stomachic and tonic. Used in dyspepsia, diarrhea and general debility. Dose: 1 ounce to 2 ounces.
This is a domestic pharmacy entry rather than a beverage for pleasure, but the method is simply a long, covered steep of a bitter bark. A few of its terms and measures need translating before it makes sense at a modern counter.
- Macerate, and why coveredMaceration here just means a long cold-going steep: boiling water is poured over the bark and the whole thing is left to stand two hours rather than simmered. The lid matters, because cascarilla's aroma is carried in a volatile oil that will drift off with the steam if the vessel is open.
- The measuresAn ounce and a half of bark is a weight, roughly 42 g; a pint is 16 fluid ounces if the book is American (about 475 ml), 20 if imperial. The dose of "1 ounce to 2 ounces" is fluid ounces, so 30-60 ml, or two to four tablespoons at a time.
- BruisedBruised bark means crushed or coarsely broken, not powdered. Cracking the quills in a mortar opens enough surface for extraction while leaving pieces large enough to strain out cleanly through a fine sieve or muslin.
- What cascarilla isThe dried bark of Croton eluteria, a Caribbean shrub, sold in curled quills and smelling faintly of musk and cinnamon when broken. It is still traded as a flavouring bark rather than a culinary spice, and no supermarket carries it; herbal suppliers and bitters makers are the usual source.
- Taste and yieldThe pint yields eight to sixteen doses and is aggressively bitter with a warm resinous edge, closer to gentian or angostura than to a tisane. In modern use the bark turns up in amaro and vermouth blends, where sugar and other botanicals carry it.
- KeepingA water infusion with no alcohol or sugar is a nutrient broth for spoilage organisms. Nineteenth-century dispensing assumed it would be drunk within a day or two; refrigerated, treat it the same way.
- The medical claims"Stomachic and tonic" describes the old class of bitter digestives, and the listed uses for dyspepsia, diarrhea and general debility reflect the period's practice, not evidence. Persistent diarrhea and unexplained weakness are matters for a physician, and this infusion should be read as a historical formula rather than a treatment.
Cascarilla bark reached European pharmacy from the Bahamas in the seventeenth century and was valued as a cheaper, sweeter-smelling bitter alongside the far more famous cinchona; it appeared in official pharmacopoeias for generations and was also mixed into smoking tobacco for its fragrance. Its presence in a general household cookbook is typical of the period: before the household could reliably reach a pharmacist, cookbooks doubled as dispensatories, and the same woman expected to raise bread was expected to macerate, strain and dose. The reasoning behind the entry is the old doctrine of bitters, which held that a bitter taste stimulated the stomach and restored appetite and tone in the convalescent. That idea outlived its medical standing and survives in the aperitif, where cascarilla is still one of the botanicals quietly at work in commercial bitters and vermouths.