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Honey and Tar Cough Candy
Boil a double handful of green hoarhound in 2 quarts of water, down to 1 quart; strain, and add to this tea 2 cups of extracted honey and a tablespoonful each of lard and tar.
Boil down to a candy, but not enough to make it brittle. Begin to eat this, increase from a piece the size of a pea to as much as can be relished. It is an excellent cough candy and always gives relief in a short time.
This is a nineteenth-century household cough remedy in candy form, and the problem is one ingredient: the tablespoonful of tar. The rest of the method is straightforward confectionery, but the recipe as written cannot be followed safely.
- "A tablespoonful of tar"The original gives no source or grade. In this period "tar" on a household shelf could mean pine tar (wood tar from destructive distillation of resinous pine) or coal tar, and neither is a food ingredient by present standards. Coal tar and its distillates contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and phenols recognized as carcinogenic; unrefined wood tar contains creosote-type phenols and benzo[a]pyrene. Tar of the kind a general store or hardware shelf sells today is not intended to be eaten.
- Dose is deliberately open-endedThe instruction to increase "from a piece the size of a pea to as much as can be relished" is the opposite of a controlled dose, and the tar is distributed unevenly through a boiled sugar mass. There is no way to know how much of the active material any given piece carries.
- Horehound itselfMarrubium vulgare, the bitter mint almost certainly meant here ("green" indicating fresh rather than dried), is the traditional base of cough drops and is not the reason for the caution. It is, however, generally avoided in pregnancy, and has been reported to affect blood sugar and, in large amounts, heart rhythm -- which matters when the recipe invites eating as much as you like.
- If you want horehound candyUse a current recipe for horehound drops, which will be horehound infusion, sugar or honey, and nothing else. For a cough, use a modern remedy.
- Reading the rest of the methodFor historical interest: two quarts reduced to one is a strong decoction; "boil down to a candy, but not enough to make it brittle" means stopping short of the hard-crack stage, probably somewhere in the soft-crack range, giving a chewy rather than glassy sweet -- though the recipe itself gives no temperature. The lard would also help keep it from setting hard and sticking to the teeth.
- Extracted honeyAn old trade term for honey spun out of the comb rather than pressed or sold in the comb -- in other words, ordinary liquid honey. Two cups is roughly 24 oz.
Horehound and tar were the two great respiratory remedies of the American home medicine chest, and this recipe simply combines them with honey, the third. Pine tar had been taken internally as an expectorant since at least the eighteenth century, and by the time this book appeared the pairing was a commercial commonplace: proprietary syrups sold under names like Honey and Tar were advertised heavily in the 1890s and 1900s, and a housewife making her own was undercutting the druggist. Horehound, a bitter European mint naturalized across North American dooryards and waste ground, was cheap and grew itself, which is why the recipe calls for a "double handful of green" rather than a weight. Its placement among the sweets is a reminder that the line between confectionery and medicine was thin in domestic manuals -- a candy that did something was still a candy. Horehound, for its part, survived on its own as the flavor of old-fashioned cough drops.