FOR A COLD
Cayenne pepper-tea for a cold. Put a quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne pepper in a tea-cup; pour over hot water and sweeten: with sugar. Or, steep horseradish in a gill of vinegar, add a gill of honey,. and take a tea-spoon every twenty minutes.
Two separate preparations run together in one entry: a hot cayenne infusion, and a horseradish-vinegar-honey syrup taken by the spoonful. Both are made from ordinary kitchen ingredients, and neither is medicine in any modern sense.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. The second preparation therefore comes to about a cup of finished syrup — enough for roughly 48 teaspoon doses, which is far more than one person needs at a sitting.
- A tea-cupUsually reckoned at about 6 fluid ounces in this period, though sources vary between roughly 6 and 8; smaller than a modern mug. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in a cup of water is genuinely fierce; start with a pinch if you are curious about the taste.
- Cayenne then and nowNineteenth-century cayenne was inconsistent in strength and was widely reported adulterated. Modern ground cayenne also varies in heat from brand to brand, so scale the quantity down until you know what yours is like.
- Steeping the horseradishFresh grated root in cold vinegar for several hours gives a sharp, volatile syrup; the pungency comes from compounds that dissipate with heat and time, so make it in small batches and keep it refrigerated. Bottled prepared horseradish is already packed in vinegar and will give a flatter result.
- Order of operationsAdd the honey after the horseradish has steeped, not before — sweetening first makes it harder to judge how much bite the vinegar has drawn out.
- HoneyNever give honey in any form to a child under one year, because of the risk of infant botulism. This applies to the syrup as written.
- What it will and will not doWarm sweet liquids soothe a sore throat and capsaicin briefly thins mucus, which is the whole of the effect. Nothing here treats an infection, and a cold that worsens or persists is a matter for a doctor rather than the pantry.
Buckeye Cookery, whose 1877 Minneapolis imprint followed earlier Ohio origins in Marysville, and which was reissued repeatedly through the 1880s, devotes a whole section to domestic medicine, on the reasonable assumption that a farm household was days from a physician and expected to manage minor illness itself. Both remedies here belong to a long tradition of treating colds with heat and pungency: cayenne was a signature of the Thomsonian botanic medicine movement popular in America earlier in the century, which held that disease came from cold and could be driven out with stimulants, and horseradish steeped in vinegar or honey appears in English household books well before that. The honey-and-vinegar base is older still — the oxymel of classical and medieval pharmacy.