Evelyn: Hi, I'm Evelyn Funda, your host for Eating the Past. And once again, I'm joined by Phebe Jensen, a Shakespearean scholar who's been talking to us about spices in early modern cookery. And now we're going to transition to talking about spices and herbs in the use of medicine.
Phebe: So, recipes appear in cookery books, but recipes also include recipes for the medical uses of herbs and spices. The crucial point here for understanding the period and also Shakespeare's references to these things, is that for early moderns, food was medicine.
Diet is a primary way to maintain health and to treat illnesses and disease, and herbs and spices have important medical powers. So just to set up the system, it's Galenic in origin from the Greek physician Galen, who pioneered, or at least wrote down, the theory of the four humors, or four human temperaments.
The goal of this kind of medicine is to get your body in balance and then keep your body in balance, because imbalance was considered the source of diseases and illnesses. So, what you're balancing are the four qualities, whether you're hot or cold and whether you're moist or dry.
So, in our USU Special Collections, we have a number of medical books, and one of them is by an Englishman named James Hart. It's called “Klinike,or The diet of the diseased.” And here's his description of the properties of nutmegs:
“Nutmegs are hot and dry in the second degree. They are very astringent” so they can help dry up moist tumors, and so they are good for this is a quote, “moist, cold, phlegmatic bodies and cold diseases.”
But here's the caution for nutmeg as well as cloves and cinnamon, all hot, dry spices.
But I advise young people hot and choleric complexions to be sparing. And the reason is that if you're already choleric, if you're already hot and you eat a lot of nutmeg you're going to overheat and you can become quarrelsome and difficult and angry.
Cloves have similar properties. They're particularly good for fainting, swooning, the plague and infectious diseases. So, all of the spices and also all of the herbs have particular qualities that you can use medically. So, you use food as a way of regulating yourself.
Evelyn: So, Phoebe, I remember you talking about the word recipes in this time period being a much broader kind of term. Can you tell me more about that?
Phebe: Yes, it's absolutely true and it's kind of a window into how they think of herbs and spices generally.
So, I'm going to give you an example of some of the uses that cinnamon, for example, and nutmeg are put to in some of these books of recipes, especially the ones we have in our collection. This is from a book of secrets in our collection.
Cinnamon can be used to make perfume, make mead, or make a lotion that make women's hands very white and beautiful. It can cure headaches, ward off smallpox, be used to make salves, to dress wounds, but it's also good for breaking enchantments, and one of the enchantments it can help you break is the enchantment of envy.
So, the principle is that one of your neighbors may have enchanted you, or the enchantment has gone in and corrupted the air and then it's entering your body through your eyes and giving you symptoms, like you're pale, you can't keep your eyes open, you feel heartbroken and you're crying.
So, the cure is to disencharm someone suffering from envy because the air is corrupted and infected, burn sweet perfume to purify the air again and sprinkle him, the infected person, with water sweetened with cinnamon, cloves, cypress, aloes, musk and amber.
Evelyn: Phoebe. This is such a rich conversation we're going to have Phoebe back for more discussion of recipes in a broader context. In other words, what recipes mean? Join us next time for Eating the Past. That's Sundays at noon right here on your UPR station.
