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This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
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Lettuce (Our garden Lettuce)
Our garden Lettuce is a cultivated variety of the wild, or strongly scented Lettuce (Lactuca virosa) which grows with prickly leaves on banks and waysides in chalky districts throughout England and Wales. This wild Lettuce contains the medicinal properties of the plant more actively than does the garden Lettuce, as grown for kitchen uses. Chemically, the cultivated Lettuce which comes to our tables contains in quite a modified degree principles which in the wild plant are narcotic, and dangerous. But these principles, lactucin, lactucopicrin, and asparagin, with oxalic, malic and citric acids, mannite, albumin, gum, and resin, have become as completely toned down, and rendered harmless, as were the child-like manners, and the pensive smile of Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee. The Lettuce, or milk plant, was esteemed by the early Romans as a sedative for inducing sleep, and to be eaten after a debauch of wine. They prepared this vegetable with eggs, and served it with the last course at their meals, so as to stimulate the appetite afresh. With ourselves, the Roman, or Cabbage Lettuce, is the best to "boil, stew, or put into hodge-podge"; then come different sorts of the Cos Lettuce to be eaten raw. When tied up compactly, and thus bleached as to its inner leaves, the lettuce remains tender, crisp, and succulent, being easily digested, even by dyspeptic persons, except as regards the hard stalk. The lettuce contains but little nutriment, though supplying some mineral salts, particularly nitre. In the stem there still lingers a small amount of the sleepinducing principle, lactucerin, especially when the plant is flowering. The Cabbage Lettuce, lactuca sativa vericeps, is slightly bitter, because of its milky juice containing the soothing principle lactucin. Galen termed the plant "philosopher's, or wise man's herb." Its condensed juice is named thridax in France, and lactucarium in England, when drying into a kind of gum, brown like the opium-gum of Poppies, but much milder of effects. Two grains of this lactucarium from the garden lettuce may be safely given to a young child for soothing it to sleep. Mr. Roker, the rough turnkey of the Fleet Prison in which Mr. Pickwick chose to be incarcerated for debt, on being asked to point out which was the bedstead allotted to that gentleman, denoted a very rusty one in the corner of the room. "It would make one go to sleep, that bedstead would," said Roker, "whether they wanted to, or not." should think," said Sam Weller, (Mr. Pickwick's manservant), eying the piece of furniture in question, with a look of excessive disgust, "I should think poppies was nothing to it."
With regard to peace of mind as essential towards good sleep, "beware," says Dr. Kennedy, "of the theologians who have no sense of mirth; they are not altogether human. Keep your chin up, don't take your troubles to bed with you, hang them on a chair with your trowsers, or drop them into a glass with your teeth." Pope has sung concerning our garden lettuce: "If you need rest, Lettuce, and cowslip wine, probatum est."
But if the lettuce is taken at supper with the view of promoting sleep, it should be had without any vinegar, which would neutralize its soporific effects. In his Book of Sallets John Evelyn writes enthusiastically about the Lettuce, "So harmless is it that it may be safely eaten raw; in fevers it allays heat, bridles choler, extinguishes thirst, excites appetite, kindly nourishes, and, above all, represses vapours, conciliates sleep, and mitigates pain, besides the effect it has upon the morals, temperance and charity." "By reason," concludes Evelyn, "of its soporiferous quality, the Lettuce ever was, and still continues to be the principal foundation of the universal tribe of sallets, because it cools and refreshes, besides its other properties, and therefore was held in such high esteem by the ancients that divers of the Valerian family dignified and ennobled their name with that of Lactucinii. It is botanically distinguished as the Lactuca sativa, from the plenty of milk that it hath, and causeth." "Lettuce of lac derivyed is perchaunce, For mylk it hath, or yeveth abundaunce." "With the old Romans" (vegetable feeders) adds Evelyn, "time was before men, in those golden days" (and less sleep was needed than now), " their spirits were brisk, and lively": "Ubi dicto citius curata sopori Membra dedit; vegetus præscripta ad munera surgit." "With shorter, but much sweeter sleep content Vigorous, and fresh about their business went."
They could then make an honest meal, and dine upon a sallet, without so much as a grain of exotic spice." "See now how pale they look, how wretchedly With yesterday's surcharge disturbed they be; Nor body only suff'ring, but the mind, That nobler part, -dull, and depress'd we find."
Lettuce, after wine, says Horace, swims in the soured stomach : 66 "Nam lactuca innatat acri Post vinum stomacho."
That excellent Emperor, Tacitus, used to say of Lettuce that he did summum se mercari," when he ate of them, and call'd it a sumptuous feast, with a sallet, and a single pullet; which was usually all the flesh-meat that sober prince ate of; whilst Maximinus (a professed enemy to salad), is reported to have "scarce been satisfy'd with sixty pounds of flesh, and drink proportionable." Boiled Lettuce (in its own water only) has a very delicate flavour, being considered by some persons superior even to asparagus. Take a large, well-grown Lettuce, and wash it thoroughly in strong salt and water to remove insects, then rinse it well out in fresh water, and gently stew it for ten or fifteen minutes. Serve on buttered toast, with a light sprinkling of pepper and salt. Sorrel soup (bonne femme) is to be made also with Lettuces. Leaves of Cabbage Lettuces are bruised with the sorrel in butter, treated with bouillon, and a liaison of egg-yolk, butter, sugar, and browned gelatinous gravy. The sorrel and lettuce must be present in about equal quantities; less than this of sorrel would be useless.
Two cookable things are buried in this essay: lettuce stewed in its own water and served on toast, and a sorrel soup thickened with egg yolk. Everything else on the page is pharmacology of a kind no longer practised, and the medicinal directions in it should be read, not followed.
- Ignore the dosing adviceThe line about giving two grains of lactucarium to a young child to make it sleep is nineteenth-century pharmacy and has no place in a kitchen. Lactucarium, the dried latex of Lactuca virosa and its relatives, was sold as a mild sedative but is not a food ingredient, and sedating a child is a matter for a doctor. The claim that vinegar cancels lettuce's soporific effect is folklore with nothing behind it.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is longLettuce collapses within two or three minutes of heat. Fifteen minutes of stewing gives you the soft, olive-coloured braised lettuce of French cooking rather than anything crisp, which is what the writer means, but if you want the leaves to keep any structure, cut the time to a third.
- "In its own water only"This is the hinge of the boiled lettuce. Wash the head, shake it but do not dry it, and put it into a heavy pan over low heat with a lid on; the water clinging to the leaves plus the water in them is all the liquid needed. Adding water dilutes the flavour and leaves you draining away most of what you were cooking for.
- The salt-water washWashing in strong brine was a common Victorian method for driving insects out of a tight head of lettuce, and it still works. A rinse in cold running water is enough for washed supermarket lettuce; save the brine soak for a garden head with a dense heart.
- Which lettuce"Roman, or Cabbage Lettuce" is what would now be sold as butterhead or a firm-hearted round lettuce; Cos is romaine. Both braise well. Iceberg is too watery and modern loose-leaf and baby-leaf mixes disintegrate.
- YieldOne good-sized head cooks down to about a single portion on toast. For four people, four heads and four slices of buttered toast, with the pan juices spooned over.
- Reading the soupBouillon is a light stock. A liaison is egg yolk beaten with a little hot liquid and stirred in off the heat to thicken; let it boil and it curdles. "Browned gelatinous gravy" most likely means a spoonful of reduced meat glaze, what a modern kitchen would call demi-glace or a well-reduced brown stock. The sugar probably serves to blunt the sorrel's sharpness rather than to sweeten the soup.
- Sorrel's aciditySorrel is high in oxalic acid. The recipe calls for sorrel and lettuce in about equal quantities and warns that any less sorrel would be useless. Cook it in a non-reactive pan; it will turn cast iron and untinned copper metallic and grey. It also loses its green almost at once, which is normal.
This page comes from the tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian medical-culinary compendium, in which a doctor gathered classical quotation, plant chemistry and a couple of workable recipes under a single vegetable's name. Its authorities are the ones such books always reach for: Galen, Horace, and above all John Evelyn, whose Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets of 1699 is the "Book of Sallets" quoted at length here and the source of the etymology from lac, milk, for the milky latex that seeps from a cut lettuce stem. That latex is real, and so is lactucarium, the dried gum that nineteenth-century pharmacies sold as "lettuce opium" and stocked as a substitute for the genuine article; the wild Lactuca virosa yields far more of it than the garden plant, which is the distinction the author opens with. The Roman habit of eating lettuce after wine, and the association of the plant with sleep, is genuinely ancient and repeated throughout classical writing, though the sedative effect attributed to a supper salad is traditional rather than demonstrated. The passing racial comparison, and the Dickens digression about the Fleet Prison, are the marks of a book written to be browsed by the fireside as much as consulted at the stove.