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3 THE REMEDIES: TOP TO TOE CARE FOR A HEALTHY BODY

Herbal remedies can have a reputation for being rather ominous, dark brews, laboriously boiled for hours and knocked back in a single traumatic gulp, with your fingers firmly pinched over your nose.

Despite my best efforts to avoid the issue, I must confess that for many old-school traditional remedies this reputation is well deserved. I was subjected to a fair few acrid concoctions when growing up, and can personally confirm their powerful pre-emptive placebo effect. Nothing can make a sick child’s symptoms miraculously disappear as fast as being presented with a murky bowl of soup scattered with unidentified roots and twigs. Sorry, Mum.

Luckily, not all natural medicines have to be this way, and I am a passionate believer (almost evangelical, in fact) that the vast majority are unbelievably easy to make and can look and taste truly wonderful.

What I find incredibly exciting from a culinary perspective is that herbal remedies can open up a whole range of truly amazing flavours to which we would otherwise be oblivious. Meadowsweet blossoms, traditionally used to relieve pain, have a fizzy, sweet flavour of rich marzipan and elderflowers, while echinacea has an almost electric, metallic tingle, provided by alkylamides (the group of chemicals that give the plant its immune-enhancing effects). I know how geeky this sounds, but I am convinced that the weird and wonderful flavours of many medicinal plants are perfect for chefs and mixologists. You just wait, it won’t be long before feverfew martinis are on the menus of swanky cocktail bars everywhere. But I digress.

Experimenting in my kitchen at home with all sorts of medicinal ingredients for this book, I have created a collection of entirely new recipes. These are my modern twist on age-old remedies and are as easy to make as they are delicious to drink, wonderful to smell and soothing to apply. The intensely bitter, drying taste of willow bark tea (one of the substances from which aspirin was first derived) has been turned into a smoky, sweet willow and lime granita, a modern (and, frankly, far more palatable) take on the original, which nevertheless does just as good a job. True, my experiments don’t always work out right, and some recipes have undergone over a dozen reformulations before I finally got them spot on, but I think that’s half the fun. There are fewer hard and fast rules with herbal remedies than you might imagine; as long as you pick the right plant and prepare it in a broadly similar way to its traditional use and dosage, there is plenty of room to mix and match and play around.

I suppose the useful thing is that most of the laborious trial-and-error work has been done by me, leaving you with a collection of tried-and-tested modern home remedies. They are presented here more or less according to the part of the body they are used to treat, to give you a top-to-toe guide to natural medicines that can easily be prepared at home. All you have to do now is get stuck in!