Читать книгу The Book of Herbs - Rosalind Northcote - Страница 21

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Dandelion, with globe and down,

The schoolboy’s clock in every town,

Which the truant puffs amain,

To conjure lost hours back again.

William Howitt.

Dandelion leaves used to be boiled with lentils, and one recipe bids one have them “chopped as pot-herbes, with a few Allisanders boyled in their broth.” But generally they were regarded as a medicinal, rather than a salad plant. Evelyn, however, includes them in his list, and says they should be “macerated in several waters, to extract the Bitterness. It was with this Homely Fare the Good Wife Hecate entertain’d Theseus.” A better way of “extracting the Bitterness” is to blanch the leaves, and it has been advised to dig up plants from the road-sides in winter when salad is scarce, and force them in pots like succory. He continues that of late years “they have been sold in most Herb Shops about London for being a wonderful Purifier of the Blood.” Culpepper, whose fiery frankness it is impossible to resist quoting, manages on this subject to get his knife into the doctors, as, to do him justice, he seldom loses an opportunity of doing. “You see what virtues this common herb hath, and this is the reason the French and Dutch so often eate them in the spring, and now, if you look a little further, you may see plainly, without a pair of spectacles, that foreign physicians are not so selfish as ours are, but more communicative of the virtues of plants to people.” The Irish used to call it Heart-Fever-Grass. The root, when roasted and ground, has been substituted for coffee, and gave satisfaction to some of those who drank it. Hogg relates a tale of woe from the island of Minorca, how that once locusts devoured the harvest there, and the inhabitants were forced to, and did subsist on this root, but does not mention for what length of time.

SWEET CICELY AND OTHER HERBS