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Marshmallow Water
A decoction of marshmallow is efficacious in the cure of severe coughs, catarrhs, etc. Cut the roots into thin slices, and pour over them boiling water (about a pint to an ounce of the root), cleansing and peeling off the outer skin before infusion. The water may be flavoured with the squeezed juice and grated rind of an orange, and sweetened with honey or brown sugar-candy. Marshmallow leaves are eaten dressed like lettuce, as a salad. Time, two hours to infuse.
A demulcent tisane of the kind that filled the invalid-cookery pages of Victorian household books. It is simple to make; the only real variables are the strength of the root and how you extract it.
- The ratioOne ounce of root to a pint is roughly 28 g to 570 ml (an imperial pint). The instruction to slice and peel suggests fresh root, which is rare outside a garden; herbalists and online suppliers sell the root dried, shredded or cut and sifted.
- Infusion, not decoctionThe entry calls it a decoction but describes an infusion — boiling water poured over, then left to stand. Follow the instruction rather than the word: the mucilage that makes the drink soothing is degraded by prolonged boiling.
- Cold water works betterModern herbal practice extracts marshmallow root in cold or barely warm water for several hours, precisely because the polysaccharides swell rather than break down. The two-hour standing time here is the point of the recipe, not an afterthought.
- Strain properlyThe finished liquid is faintly slippery and will carry fine root fibre. Pass it through muslin or a fine sieve, or the texture becomes unpleasant.
- Sugar-candyBrown sugar-candy is large crystallised cane sugar, sold today as rock sugar or rock candy. Ordinary brown sugar or honey does the same job; a tablespoon per cup is plenty.
- Not the confectionThis has nothing to do with the modern marshmallow sweet, which is gelatine and whipped sugar and contains no plant at all.
- The salad noteMarshmallow leaves (Althaea officinalis) are edible and were eaten dressed as salad, but they are tough and faintly furry. Use only young leaves, and only from plants you have identified with certainty.
- One practical caveatMucilaginous drinks can slow the absorption of medication taken at the same time. Space it an hour or two apart from anything prescribed.
Marshmallow has been a medicine far longer than it has been a flavour: the genus name Althaea comes from the Greek althainein, to heal, and the root's slippery mucilage has been used against sore throats and coughs since antiquity. Victorian household manuals treated the sickroom as part of the kitchen's business — barley water, beef tea, linseed tea and marshmallow water all belonged to the cook, not the chemist. The French confection pâte de guimauve, generally traced to nineteenth-century Parisian confectioners, began as the same root boiled with sugar and egg white into a medicinal lozenge; the modern marshmallow is its descendant, with the plant long since dropped out.