Home › The Principles of Cookery › Wormwood Lozenges
Wormwood Lozenges
Dissolve some gum tragacanth in water, and mix with it a little spirit of wormwood. Add as much powdered loaf sugar as will make a stiff paste, and beat the mixture thoroughly. Roll it out to a sheet of the thickness of a penny-piece, stamp it into diamond-shaped pieces, and dry these in a cool oven.
This is an apothecary's lozenge rather than a sweet, and the active ingredient is the problem. The mechanics of the paste are straightforward; the wormwood is not.
- Spirit of wormwood is the hazardPreparations of Artemisia absinthium owe their character to thujone, a neurotoxic terpene that in quantity causes vomiting, kidney irritation and convulsions. A confection designed to be eaten repeatedly through the day is exactly the wrong delivery method for it.
- "A little" is not a doseThe recipe names no volume, no strength and no yield, so there is no way to know how much wormwood ends up in a single lozenge. Nineteenth-century "spirit of wormwood" could mean anything from a dilute tincture to a distilled essence many times stronger, and the difference between the two is the difference between bitter and poisonous.
- It is regulated for a reasonThujone levels in food and drink are capped by law in the UK, EU and US, and wormwood is restricted to those limits rather than freely permitted as a food ingredient. A homemade lozenge has no way of measuring against those limits. If you want a bitter herbal pastille, buy a commercial one.
- Gum tragacanthStill sold, usually as a fine powder for sugar paste and cake decorating, and it does what the recipe says: hydrated in water it makes a stiff, workable gum paste. Tragacanth itself is harmless and is the standard binder in old lozenge-making.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in hard cones, scraped or nipped off and pounded. The equivalent is plain granulated sugar ground to a powder, or shop icing sugar, though the latter carries cornflour that slightly changes the set.
- A cool ovenAround 200-225F, or in practice the residual heat of a range after baking. The lozenges are being dried out, not baked; any real colour on them means the oven was too hot.
- The thickness of a penny-pieceThe Victorian bronze penny was roughly 1.5 to 2mm thick, a little thicker than a modern penny. It is a thickness gauge, not a measure of diameter.
Lozenges sat on the border between the confectioner's shop and the chemist's, and Cassell's carried a run of them among its sugar work, including bitter ones like this. Gum tragacanth paste stamped into diamonds was the standard vehicle, and the word lozenge is generally traced to the diamond shape rather than to anything medicinal. Wormwood was one of the classic bitters of the pharmacopoeia, taken as a tonic and a supposed vermifuge, and its name is often linked to that worm-expelling use, though the etymology is disputed and the Old English form predates the association. The same plant flavours absinthe, and the moral panic over absinthe that peaked in the decades around 1900 is one reason wormwood moved from the tonic shelf to the regulated list.