Drugs, Sugar, and Cowslips
One of the things I love about food is that you can start off with something seemingly trivial (cowslips) and end up probing into fundamental problems about health, diet (or politics and religion, though not in this post).
Adam Balic again.
There are various bioactive elements from the plant that are extacted commercially. Apparently commercial cultivation is a pain, so there is interest in growing them in tissue culture. I am pretty wary of untested natural remedies, however the dropsy/ discovery of digitalis is worth noting.
The plant is the cowslip. I agree that the belief that untested natural remedies represent a huge reservoir of opportunities is over-hyped. Some, maybe, but people aren’t dumb. They’ve been probing “natural remedies” for centuries now.
It is interesting to hear you talk about the dearth of green things in a significant part of the year in the UK. It is something that I have been thinking about as it is something that is taken for granted now in many cases.
When sugar was introduced into the UK it must have seemed like a magical substance. As a preservative it is excellent and it makes fruit look and taste delicious, but if you consider something like the rose hip syrup that I made the other day, the advantage of having a ready source of Vitamin C during the Winter can’t be under estimated.
Dearth of green and fresh was very real in March, April and May. I don’t think he’d ever experienced it but T.S.Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month” is apposite. All that burgeoning greenery and nothing green to eat. Social historians have very good pieces on the hardships this seasonal shortage caused. Pregnant women were at special risk.
And good for you for rose hips. I tried it many times. Those beastly hairy fibres inside made separating rose hips from the interior really hard. Rose hip syrup was widely touted in World War II as a vitamin source.
