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FOR CONSTIPATION
The same remedies will not affect all persons. One or two figs eaten fasting is sufficient for some, and they are especially good in the case of children, as there is no trouble in getting them to take them. A spoon of wheaten bran in a glass of water is a simple remedy and quite effective. One or two tumblers of hot water will move almost every one, but is difficult to take. In chronic cases a faithful manipulation and moving of bowels and limbs with gentle rotary movement with the open palm, and giving all natural motions to the parts, with proper diet, will almost invariably secure the desired result. It has been known to cure a case of life-long habit, where inherited, too, and although it involves patience and perseverance, it is certainly better than to suffer the ills that result from so many patent medicines and quack nostrums. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," and regularity of habit in this matter is the great thing to be impressed on people generally.
Or, three tea-cups each of coarse, clean wheat-bran and sifted flour, one heaping measure each of Horsford's bread preparation (soda and acid), seven teaspoons good butter and one of salt. Mix with cold sweet milk; roll third of an inch thick, cut with a biscuit cutter and bake thoroughly in a moderate oven; or, pour hot water on one table-spoon flax seed, pour off and at once add three or four table-spoons of cold water, and drink. This is perfectly harmless and may be taken once, twice, or thrice a day if necessary; or, a teaspoon black mustard-seed taken every morning; or a glass of cold water taken at night and first thing in the morning.
Buried in this list of remedies is a genuine formula: a bran biscuit, plus a flaxseed drink. Both are makeable, though the biscuit is written in vanished units and depends on a leavener that no longer exists under that name.
- Horsford's bread preparationAn early phosphate baking powder sold by the Rumford Chemical Works, originally supplied as separate soda and acid packets to be combined. Modern phosphate baking powder is its commercial descendant, but since the size of the recipe's "measure" is unknown, no one-for-one substitution can honestly be claimed.
- "One heaping measure" is ambiguousIt may point to a scoop supplied with the Horsford package, but the text does not say so, and no honest conversion is possible. On the order of 4 teaspoons of baking powder would suit this quantity of dry material, but that is an inference, not a translation.
- Tea-cupsA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at two-thirds to three-quarters of a modern cup, so three tea-cups each of bran and sifted flour is roughly 2 to 2 1/4 cups of each. The dough is stiff and dry.
- Seven teaspoons butterAbout 1 1/4 oz, or 35 g. Rub it into the dry ingredients as for pastry before the milk goes in.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk. It is called sweet to distinguish it from buttermilk and clabbered milk.
- Oven and the point of "thoroughly"The book gives no temperatures; "moderate oven" is conventionally equated with about 350F. Rolled a third of an inch thick and baked until dry through, these come out closer to a hard cracker than a soft biscuit.
- The flaxseed drinkThe hot water is poured off, rinsing the seed; the cold water that follows is what is drunk. Mucilage is the active principle, though a brief cold soak draws out little of it.
- Bran in waterCoarse bran taken dry in a single glass of water needs to be followed by more fluid through the day, or it does the opposite of what is wanted.
Buckeye Cookery (the 1877 Minneapolis edition, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, is the one usually cited, and the book was reprinted for decades) devotes long sections to home medicine because for many of its readers a doctor was a day's travel and a real expense away. The entry sits at the intersection of two currents of the period: a suspicion of patent medicines, a number of which were laxatives containing mercury compounds or a good deal of alcohol, and the American vogue for coarse whole grain as a cure-all, generally traced to Sylvester Graham's temperance-adjacent dietary preaching of the 1830s. The named leavener is a real product with a documented inventor: Eben Norton Horsford, a Harvard chemistry professor, developed the calcium phosphate baking powder sold from the 1850s by the Rumford Chemical Works in Rhode Island. Its appearance here, in a health biscuit rather than a cake, suggests how readily a branded chemical leavener could be assumed in an ordinary American pantry.