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CARAWAY - WONDER DRUG! The anonymous Housekeeper’s Guide, or Every Man His Own Doctor (1841) a homey compendium of medical remedies, included a description of “Essential oil of Carraways”, recommending it as “good against plague, poison, and melancholy [and] causeth rest, helps difficulty of urine, jaundice, dropsy; it breaks the stone, stops fluxes, and expels the wind; it comforts all the inward parts; it provokes the terms [menses] and is powerful in removing all obstructions of the liver, spleen and lungs, causing a sweet breath, taking away asthmas, and causeth a good appetite. It is good in all diseases proceeding from cold, and affecting the head or nerves, as vertigos, catarrahs, megrims, headaches and deafness. Mix one drop with oil of almonds and put it into the ear every morning.
Wow! So that’s what the medical profession has been looking for all this time. At last – the Holy Grail1 A simple little seed that can cure all ills. And all you have to do is to mix one drop of the oil – one drop! – with oil of almonds and stick it in your ear. I’m amazed! I just wonder why such an incredibly powerful elixir has ended up in Polish cabbage dishes. Or is that why all Poles live to 140? And I thought it was the vodka.
Anyway, come on down to Aspen House – there’s bound to be a cabbage and caraway dish on the go. Especially now that I know what it can do . . .
(Thanks once again to Jeffrey Kacirk’s Forgotten English)
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