Natural Remedies: What The Old Household Books Actually Said

The phrase natural remedies now arrives wrapped in a lot of noise, most of it from people selling something with a very loud claim attached. That is a shame, because the tradition underneath it is far quieter and far more sensible than its current reputation. For most of history a household kept a short list of things it reached for first, before anybody considered fetching a doctor, and somebody wrote that list down. Those books still exist. They are worth reading, and what is striking about them is how modest they are.

What Was Actually In Them

The contents are less exotic than people expect. Open an old household book and you mostly find things you already have. Honey. Salt. Vinegar. Oats. Ginger. Garlic. Onion. Mustard. Chamomile, mint and other common leaves made into a drink. Oil and beeswax made into a salve. The rare and difficult ingredients that fill the modern imagination are rare in the books too, because the whole point of a household remedy was that it had to be available at nine in the evening in the middle of winter without leaving the house.

• Warm drinks made from leaves and flowers, used mostly for comfort, for settling, and for getting fluid into somebody who does not want to drink.
• Things applied to the skin. Salves, oils, and poultices, which is simply a soft mass held against the skin under a cloth.
• Syrups, which exist because honey and sugar preserve things and because children will take a spoon of something sweet.
• Steams and inhalations, which needed nothing but a bowl of hot water and something aromatic.
• Plain physical measures. Rest, warmth, elevation, cold on a bruise. These fill more pages than anything else and they are the least talked about part of the tradition.

The Tone Is The Interesting Part

What surprises most people reading these books for the first time is how careful the language is. The old books are noticeably more restrained than modern writing on the same subject. They describe what to do, they say when the thing was usually used, and again and again they say some version of send for the doctor. They were written by people who had seen illness go badly and who had no illusions about what a warm drink could and could not do. The overclaiming came later, from people selling bottles, not from the households.

Why These Books Are Coming Back

Several things are pushing people back towards this, and only one of them is fashion. Getting seen takes longer than it used to in a lot of places. Ordinary things cost more than they did. And a great many people have had the experience of dealing with something minor at eleven at night, finding nothing useful in the cupboard, and realising they had no idea what their grandmother would have done. That last one is the real driver. It is not distrust of medicine. It is the gap between nothing and a doctor, and that gap is exactly the gap these books were written to fill.

The honest framing is the one the old books used themselves. This is the first thing you try for something small, and the thing you do while you decide whether it is small. It is comfort, it is care, and it is having something in the house. It is not treatment and it is not a cure, and anybody presenting it as either has left the tradition and joined the people selling bottles.

If You Want To Start One Of Your Own

• Start from what is already in the kitchen rather than from a shopping list. The tradition was built on what was to hand and yours should be too.
• Write down what you actually used and whether it helped. A household book is a record, not a manual, and yours becomes useful only once it has your own notes in it.
• Learn three things properly rather than thirty badly. A tea, a syrup and a salve covers most of what these books were used for.
• Check interactions if anybody in the house takes regular medication. This is the one genuinely important piece of homework and it takes a pharmacist about two minutes to answer.

One practical note on keeping any of this in the house. The reason the old books leaned so heavily on honey, vinegar, salt and dried leaves is that all four keep almost indefinitely, and a remedy you cannot make at eleven at night because the ingredient went off is not a remedy. So if you are going to stock anything, stock the things that last. Dried flowers and leaves in a sealed jar away from light will be fine for a year. Oils go rancid and should be bought small. Anything made fresh with water needs using the same day. None of that is complicated, but it is the difference between a cupboard you use and a shelf of jars you feel vaguely guilty about.

The book we sell on the kitchen end of this is Kitchen Remedies: Natural Remedies You Did Not Know You Had, at $12.99. It stays inside the modest framing described above, because that is the only version of this subject worth writing.