More on Cowslips in Cooking
From Adam Balic
I have been at a loss to explain the use of cowslips in pudding and wine. A typical recipe is: 1 peck chopped flowers (16 imperial pints volume), 1/2 lb Naples biscuits, 3 pints of cream, 16 eggs. Even scaled down this is a lot of flowers. And they are not large or flowers either. If it was for the yellow colour, there are better choices.
However, in wine it is said that “The blossoms of the Cowslip are sometimes used to give a muscadel flavour to home-made wine,—therefore termed Cowslip Wine; but their long-lost virtue of curing paralytic disorders rendered them still more valuable to our ancestors. On this account the plant was called Palsywort, or, contractedly, Passwort, and had the cheering name of Herba paralyseos, in the Latin herbals of the medical botanists.”
In fact the flowers were thought to be narcotic; “The flowers are certainly indued with a gently narcotic and sedative property, and we are informed on credible authority that they will frequently, in delicate habits, relieve pain and induce sleep when other narcotics would only irritate and distress the patient.”
Eh, you were not a particularly energetic child were you? In my family (back in Croatia) a bit of milk boiled with poppy heads was given to children to make them quiet or go to sleep.
I think that going to sleep with cowslips sounds better than sucking on a rag dipped in laudanum, the English equivalent of milk boiled with poppy heads. Interesting about their narcotic properties. I there any modern work on this?
I agree that the quantities required in many recipes seem improbably large. And I think even more improbably large in the past. I was taken aback looking at the photos that popped up of cowslips in Google Images to see fields golden with cowslips. That was not so in the past. Even in the best spots for cowslips, they were scattered, not massed. These photos must be of protected areas (parks and the like) where not even cattle graze. So it would have been even harder to collect such quantities.
Two other thoughts occur to me. One is that cowslips appear at the time of year when everyone in the past was desperate for something fresh. Even the young leaves of hawthorn (bread and butter, they were called) were nibbled by children.
The other is that at least in the twentieth century, cowslip recipes tend to crop up in works by writers with a “folk” or anti industrial bent.
