Chicken Soup for? | The Recipes Project

By Sally Osborn

Chicken soup is one of our modern panaceas for all ills, but it was also used as medicine in the eighteenth century. However, while nowadays it is associated with treating colds and flu (and has actually been proved to have anti-inflammatory properties), then it appears to have been considered as a stomach remedy. Take this rather graphic recipe from a collection of recipes by an unknown hand (British Library, Add 29,435):

An exelent chicken broath, from Mrs Finch

Take a lean chicken, skin it & draw it put one ounce of fine
manna in the body of it, & secure it at both ends to keep the
manna in, put it in one quart of water & let it boyl gently
till it comes to one pint, then strain it off, & drink a coffe
cup full at a time till it hath answered the purpose of giving
a stool.

Tis so very innocent a woman in child bed may take it
at any time or an infant. It is perticularly good to procure
a stool in the piles, or for any great heat in the body or
complaint in the stomach when such a medison is proper
as it also comforts the stomach & bowels at the same time it
works off & often proves effectual when all medisons have failed.

The manna in question wasn?t the wonder food of the Israelites, but the dried sap of the ash tree, which has laxative properties?

Mind you, I think I might prefer an alternative (and not so innocent) remedy for the ?looseness? or diarrhoea, from another anonymous collection (Wellcome Library, MS.1321)? although it does sound more like a hangover cure:

Take 6 spoonfulls of the best brandy & beat the yolk of an egge very
well & mix with it & grate in a whole nuttmegg & put in a little sugar
& brew it well together & drink it next your heart in a morning.

Apologies for cross-posting. This post appeared on my own blog Travels and Travails in 18th-Century England?(14 January 2011).

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?Print This Post I am researching a PhD at Roehampton University in eighteenth-century domestic medicine, through the medium of manuscript recipe books.

Source: http://recipes.hypotheses.org/296

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