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MANNA AND MILK
Take a quart of fresh skim milk, and boil in it one ounce of manna; drinking this quantity cool, in small draughts, at intervals during the day, is good for consumptives.
TO PREVENT SKIN FROM DISCOLORING AFTER A BRUISE.-Apply immediately, or as soon as possible, a little dry starch or arrow-root, moistened with cold water, or rub over with common table butter.
This is a dosed medicinal preparation from the book's Medical chapter rather than a beverage, and the thing being dosed is a drug. The notes below explain what is in it and why it should be left on the page.
- Manna is not a foodThe manna of nineteenth-century pharmacy is the dried sap exudate of the manna ash, Fraxinus ornus, sold by druggists in pale flakes. Its active constituent is mannitol, still used clinically as an osmotic agent; it was stocked as a laxative, not as a sweetener or flavouring.
- One ounce is a full drug doseAn ounce is roughly 28 g of flake manna, of which mannitol is a large part, taken over a day; that is within the range druggists gave as an adult laxative dose and enough to cause cramping, watery diarrhoea and fluid loss. There is no safe way to scale a self-administered dose of a pharmaceutical osmotic from a cookbook line.
- "Good for consumptives" means tuberculosisConsumption in this period usually meant pulmonary tuberculosis, a bacterial infection that manna does nothing to touch. Anyone reaching for this recipe for its stated purpose would be substituting a laxative for antibiotic treatment of a communicable disease.
- Fresh skim milk in 1877 was rawFresh skim milk in the 1870s was raw -- Skim milk here is what is left after cream has risen and been taken off unpasteurised milk, and bovine tuberculosis was itself spread by such milk. The recipe does, however, call for the milk to be boiled, which would deal with that risk, whatever the intention behind it.
- Two entries, not oneThe bruise remedy printed after the drink is a separate household hint under its own heading, run on to the same paragraph. Dry starch or arrowroot paste on a fresh bruise is harmless but does nothing that a cold compress does not do better.
- If you want the drinkThere is no modernised version of this to offer. For a persistent cough or suspected tuberculosis, current medical advice is the only sensible route.
Buckeye Cookery, like other American household manuals of the 1870s and 80s, ran a Medical department, because the nearest physician might be a day's ride away and the family cook was also the family nurse. Manna reached those kitchens through the druggist's shelf: harvested by slashing the bark of the manna ash in Sicily and Calabria, dried into flakes, and prized as the gentlest of purgatives, mild enough for children and invalids. Its name comes from the biblical manna of Exodus, a resemblance traditionally drawn because it appeared as a sweet substance on the surface of the tree. Pairing it with skim milk fits the era's theory of consumption, which held that the wasting patient needed nourishing, easily digested liquids and an unblocked bowel; the tubercle bacillus was only identified by Robert Koch in 1882.