[Sca-cooks] Drinking scabwort/elecampane

[Johnna Holloway]

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks  by Amy Stewart indicates that elecampane is an ingredient in certain bitters, vermouths, absinthe, and herbal liqueurs. page 159. The FofC calls for it and Dawson uses it in a Rosemary water.

There is also this recipe for a conserve.
This is an excerpt from The Treasurie of commodious Conceits (England, 1573 - J. Holloway, transcr.)
The original source can be found at MedievalCookery.com

To make conserue of Elecampana Rootes. cap.xxvi. TAke the roots of Elecampane wash the clene, slice them in to peeces as big as your thumbe, seeth them in faire water, tyll they bee tender, take them up, & powne them & draw them throw a hairesiue, put therto in the second sethig the doble or treble waight of sugre and when the sugre is perfectly incorporated, take it off, and kepe it. See it be wel styred in the sething.

The vertue of the same.

COnserue of Elecampana is good to comfort ye stomack, and the noorishing mebers, it maruelously looseth tough flewme, desolueth, and consumeth the same, by the siedge it auoydeth it.

Johnnae  

On Nov 5, 2013, at 11:28 PM, JIMCHEVAL at aol.com wrote:

> It doesn't surprise me that medieval drinkers might sometimes have drunk  
scabwort (elecampane); at various times, snipped

Anyone ever come across people drinking this?

Jim  Chevallier