Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
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 information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Food Drinks and Fun Drinks › Beating the Boston Tea Party
Beating the Boston Tea Party
Mrs. Helen Morgenthau Fox, in her book Gardening with Herbs, quotes from the Virginia Gazette, January 13, 1774, a list of herb tea combinations aimed at circumventing the English tax that led to the Boston Tea Party; and this list is just as interesting today to anyone wanting to experiment, especially over a fire out in the open, with brews of herbs fresh or dried, gathered wild, or carried along in the pocket to make a swell change from the same old smoky tasting camp tea or coffee. And they'll beat any modern Boston Tea Party, too. "Sweet marjoram and a little mint; mother of thyme, a little hyssop, sage and balm leaves, joined with a little lemon juice; rosemary and lavender; a very few small twigs of White Oak well dried in the Sun with two leaves and a Half of Sweet Myrtle; Clover with a Little Chamomile; Twigs of Black Currant Bushes; Red Rose Bush leaves and Cinquefoil; Mistletoe and English Wild Valerian; Pine Buds and Lesser Valerian; Ground Ivy; with a little Lavender Cotton or Roman Wormwood, or Southernwood (sounds quite horribly bitter); Strawberry leaves and the leaves of Sweet Briar, or Dog's Rose; Golden Rod and Betony, drunk with honey; Twigs of liquid Amber Tree (commonly called Sweet Gum) with or without the flowers of Elder; Peppermint and Yarrow."
An old English recipe prescribes a tablespoon of mixed dried herbs of all sorts, with a pint of boiling water poured over them. Another says to pour a pint of boiling water over a sprig each of sage, burnet, balm and sorrel, and a slice of lemon. This latter tea will quench thirst and serve as a spring tonic besides.
In the old English recipe books flower teas continually crop up too, such as cowslip, elder blossoms, and sweet woodruff which is the Suisse of the French (tasting like new mown hay) and the Waldmeister Germans put into their May Bowls to freshen wine. Violets once were dried and steeped in boiling water, a teaspoon of the flowers to each cup, then sweetened with honey. And today some cosmeticians sell strawberry leaves at $3.00 a pound for their supposed value as slimming tea. Tisane de tilleul is made of dried linden (lime tree) flowers and their adjoining leaves.
This is a list of infusions rather than a single recipe, and several of the plants named are toxic or misidentified. The notes below explain what the terms mean and where the specific hazards lie.
- MistletoeBoth the European and American mistletoes contain toxic proteins and amines; leaves, stems and berries have been implicated in poisonings, and berries should be kept away from children. An infusion of mistletoe is not a beverage.
- Wormwood and its relativesRoman wormwood, southernwood and lavender cotton (santolina) all carry thujone or related volatile compounds. Thujone is a neurotoxin, regulated in food and drink for that reason, and an uncontrolled home infusion gives no way to know the dose.
- ValerianBoth "English Wild Valerian" and "Lesser Valerian" are sedative. They interact with alcohol and with prescription sedatives.
- Pennyroyal-adjacent mints and "a little mint""A little mint" -- The list names mint without specifying which. Unspecified plant names in a period text are not a safe basis for foraging; some mint relatives, pennyroyal among them, are hepatotoxic, though pennyroyal is not named here.
- Look-alikesYarrow in particular is gathered from rough ground where poison hemlock and water hemlock grow, and the young foliage is easily confused. Field identification from an eighteenth-century word list, without a current regional key, is how people get hurt.
- Reading the measurementsThe two English formulas given are a tablespoon of mixed dried herb to a pint of boiling water, and a sprig each of four herbs plus a lemon slice to a pint. If the sources are English, the pint may be the imperial 20 fl oz rather than the American 16.
- Terms that have shifted"Liquid Amber Tree" is Liquidambar styraciflua, sweet gum. "Sweet Myrtle" is ambiguous and may mean sweet gale or bog myrtle rather than true myrtle. "Suisse" and "Waldmeister" both refer to sweet woodruff, whose coumarin content is itself restricted in food use in several countries.
- If you want herb teaUse a current, properly sourced culinary herb tea recipe and cultivated or commercially sold herbs. This page is worth reading as history and nothing else.