Herbal Remedies: How People Actually Made Them At Home, Step By Step

You have read the lists. Chamomile for this, ginger for that, thyme for the other. Then you stood in the kitchen with a jar of dried leaves and realised none of those pages told you what to actually do with them. How much, in what, for how long, kept in what, thrown away when. Your grandmother seemed to just know. The lists assume you do too, and you do not, and it makes you feel faintly foolish for asking.

You are not foolish. The lists skip the method because the method is the hard part to write down. So this post is only the method: the five ways households turned a plant into something they could use, step by step, with the safety rules that go with each one. It does not tell you any plant cures anything, because that is not something a kitchen can promise.

Why The Method Matters More Than The Plant

The old household books were not really plant directories. They were books of technique. Once you know how to make a tea, a simmered brew, a syrup, an oil and a poultice, you can put almost any suitable plant through them, and the book stops being a list you consult and becomes a skill you have. The plant changes from house to house and region to region. The five methods barely changed at all. That is the part worth learning, and it is the part almost nobody teaches.

Method One: The Tea, For Leaves And Flowers

• Use it for the soft parts of a plant: leaves and flowers. They give up what is in them quickly and are spoiled by boiling.
• Put a small handful of fresh leaves, or a heaped teaspoon of dried, in a cup or a pot.
• Pour on water just off the boil and cover it straight away. The lid keeps the smell in the cup instead of the kitchen, and the smell is a large part of the point.
• Leave it five to ten minutes, strain, and drink it while it is warm. A tea was made fresh each time. It was not kept.

Method Two: The Simmered Brew, For Roots, Bark And Seeds

Hard parts of a plant, ginger root, cinnamon bark, fennel seed, do not give much up to a quick steep. The old method was to simmer them instead. Chop or crush the root or bark small, put it in a pan of cold water, bring it slowly to a simmer, and keep it there with the lid on for fifteen to twenty minutes. Strain it, let it cool a little, and use it that day. If a recipe mixes hard and soft parts, the household way was to simmer the hard parts first, take the pan off the heat, and then add the leaves to steep as if for a tea.

Method Three: The Syrup, A Brew You Can Keep A Little Longer

• Make a strong simmered brew or tea as above, then strain it well.
• Return the liquid to the pan and simmer it gently, uncovered, until it has reduced to roughly half.
• Take it off the heat, let it cool until it is warm rather than hot, and stir in honey or sugar until it thickens. Households used about as much sweetener as liquid, because the sweetness is what keeps it.
• Pour it into a clean glass bottle, label it with what it is and the date, and keep it in the fridge. Throw it out at the first sign of mould, fizzing or a sour smell.

Method Four: The Infused Oil, For The Outside Of The Body

An infused oil is a plant soaked in a plain oil, such as olive or sunflower, until the oil takes on its smell and colour. Households used it for rubbing into skin, not for eating. The usual method was to use well dried plant, fill a clean, dry jar loosely with it, cover it completely with oil, and leave it somewhere warm for a couple of weeks, shaking it now and then, before straining it through cloth into a clean bottle. Dried plant was the rule for a reason everybody in those houses understood: water left in the jar is where things start to go wrong.

The modern safety line on this is firm, and I would hold to it. The CDC's advice on preventing botulism is to refrigerate homemade oils made with garlic or herbs and throw them away after four days. That advice is about oil you might eat, so if there is any chance an oil ends up in food, follow it exactly. Never make a kitchen oil with fresh garlic and leave it on the counter.

Method Five: The Poultice, A Warm Paste Laid On Skin

A poultice is the oldest and simplest of the five. You mash or chop the plant, mix it with a little hot water, or with oats or flour to bind it, until you have a thick warm paste, then wrap it in a thin clean cloth and lay it on the skin. The cloth matters: the plant should not sit directly on broken skin. Test the heat on the inside of your wrist first, the way you would test a baby's bottle, and take it off at once if the skin stings, reddens or itches. A poultice was for unbroken skin and ordinary aches. An open wound, a hot swollen patch that is spreading, or a red line moving away from a cut was never a poultice job. That is an infection, and it needs a doctor today.

The Safety Rules That Go With All Five

• Natural does not mean safe. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health makes the point with kava, a member of the pepper family whose supplements can cause liver disease.
• Check against your medicines. The same agency says some supplements may harm you if you have a particular condition or take certain prescription or over the counter medicines. A pharmacist can check a herb against what you take in a couple of minutes, for free.
• Be careful with pregnancy, breastfeeding and children. The agency says many supplements have not been tested in pregnant women, nursing mothers or children. Ask first.
• Nobody checked it before it reached the shelf. The agency notes the FDA is not authorized to review dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they are sold. Buying a herb in a nice packet does not mean anybody tested it.
• Never pick a wild plant unless you are certain what it is. Plenty of harmless plants have poisonous lookalikes, and a guess is not good enough.
• Label everything. Name and date on every jar and bottle. The most common household mistake was not a bad recipe. It was an unlabelled jar nobody could identify a month later.

The Honest Hours, And Where This Stops

These are my own rough estimates, not promises. A tea takes ten minutes. A simmered brew takes about half an hour. A syrup takes an hour, most of it waiting for the pan to reduce. An infused oil takes twenty minutes of work and then a couple of weeks of patience. A poultice takes a quarter of an hour. Learning all five properly, so you can do them without a recipe in front of you, is a few weekends of practice, and most people get the first syrup wrong.

And here is where it stops. A herbal remedy made at home is a comfort and a craft. It is not a treatment, and it is not a reason to wait. A fever that will not come down, a cough that has lasted weeks, chest pain, trouble breathing, a wound that is getting worse, or anything in a baby or a very old person goes to a doctor, not to the kitchen. The households that relied on these methods would have given a great deal for that option. Use it.

If you want all of this written down properly, ten methods in full, with when to pick, how to dry, what to keep things in and how to tell when something has gone bad, the book we sell is Home Remedies: A Step By Step Guide To Making Tea, Syrup, Oil and Poultice, at $14.99, and it promises nothing about anybody's health.