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Receipt for Cold
Mrs. J. B. Riley.
One pound of liverwort put into four quarts of water and boiled down to one quart; add, while warm, a quarter pound of ball liquorice and a quarter pound of loaf sugar; when cool add a half pint of gin. Dose-half a large wineglass half an hour before each meal.
This is a dosed household medicine rather than a beverage, and several things in it are out of range for a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the units and why the preparation should be left on the page.
- "Liverwort" is not one plantIn nineteenth-century North American domestic medicine the name usually meant Hepatica americana (liverleaf), but it was also applied to Marchantia, a true liverwort, and occasionally to other cough herbs. A pound of unidentified dried plant material is not something that can be sourced or verified today.
- Hepatica is an irritantHepatica belongs to the buttercup family and the fresh plant contains protoanemonin, a vesicant that irritates the mouth, throat, stomach and kidneys. Drying reduces it but the plant was never a food, and the quantity here is unmeasurable in any modern sense.
- A quarter pound of liquorice is a pharmacological doseGlycyrrhizin, the sweet principle in liquorice, causes potassium loss and raised blood pressure in sustained doses. Four ounces of concentrated liquorice extract in a quart of syrup, taken three times a day, is well past the level at which that effect is documented.
- "Ball liquorice"Liquorice root extract boiled down and rolled into hard balls or sticks, sold by druggists and grocers. It is far more concentrated than liquorice root, which is part of why the quantity here matters.
- Alcohol as medicineHalf a pint of gin in a quart of syrup gives roughly 7 to 8 per cent alcohol by volume; half a large wineglass would be on the order of one to two fluid ounces, taken before each meal. Spirits as a repeated daily tonic was ordinary practice in 1877 and is not now.
- It will not keepThat alcohol level does not preserve a sugar-and-plant decoction reliably, and the receipt gives no bottling, sealing or storage instruction. A quart of it sitting through a winter of dosing is a spoilage problem as much as anything else.
- Units, for readingFour quarts is a US gallon, reduced to a quart. Loaf sugar is refined sugar broken from a cone, equivalent to plain white sugar. A wineglassful of the period was conventionally reckoned at about two fluid ounces; a "large" one presumably somewhat more, though the receipt fixes nothing.
- If you have a coldUse a current, tested remedy. Nothing in this receipt should be reconstructed as written.
Compiled charity cookbooks of the 1870s, of which The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) is a Canadian landmark, gathered household medicine alongside pies and pickles because the two came out of the same cupboard and the same contributor's handwriting; Mrs. J. B. Riley's cold syrup sits in the book on exactly the same footing as her neighbours' cakes. Liverwort's reputation owed something to the old doctrine of signatures, its three-lobed liver-shaped leaves being taken as a sign of its use, and by the nineteenth century it had settled into North American domestic practice as a mild cough and "consumption" herb, often boiled down with liquorice and sugar into a thick syrup. The half pint of gin is a common finishing touch of the period: spirits both carried the plant extractives and were themselves considered part of the treatment, which is one reason a bottle kept for medicinal purposes could be found even in temperance-minded households. Receipts like this one became rarer in cookbooks over the following decades as food and drug regulation and the growth of commercial pharmacy moved such preparations out of the kitchen.