vii: Foraging through Folklore
A bad taste in the mouth Ella Leith Being a bit of a foodie, I was excited to research folklore connected to taste, thinking of all the delicious folk remedies I was bound to discover. There are many, of course. I was particularly taken with a Middle Eastern cure for those blighted by the Evil Eye— a bread made with salt, Garlic (Allium sativum), Dill (Anethum graveolens), Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) and Rue (Ruta graveolens) (Rolleston, 1943:293). But, alas, there are just as many— if not more —folk remedies that are far less palatable and all the more intriguing for that. Take a cure for diphtheria, involving: gargling the throat with horse dung beaten up with vinegar, [and] swabbing the mouth with fluid obtained from crushing three male crabs (ibid:292). In a Moravian cure for oral thrush, ‘the mother wipes out the child's mouth with her genital mucus, uttering the words “Wherewith I bear thee, therewith I heal thee”’ (ibid). A similarly afflicted child in West German Bohemia would have their mouth scrubbed ‘with a cloth soaked in its urine’ (ibid:301). Thankfully, the child would then be given honey to take the taste away. By now, I’ve rather lost my appetite. I can’t help but wonder whether the more nauseating oral remedies were intended to induce vomiting and so expel illness from the 36
body. Certainly, medical traditions across the world have, at different times, considered purging, blood-letting and sweating to be effective cures. There has also been a longstanding belief in the transference of illness to someone or something else. The process could be as simple as the patient ‘spitting on the under side of a stone and then replacing it’, effectively imprisoning their malady (Rolleston, 1943:354). Other transferrals, however, required a specific occasion: a Kentish cure for warts demanded the sufferer wet their forefinger with saliva and rub the wart three times ‘in the same direction as a passing funeral, saying each time, “My wart goes with you”’ (Selare, 1939:353). In many more such cures, animals were the preferred vessel. It was believed whooping cough could be transferred to a dog by ‘taking a hair from the patient's neck, putting it between slices of bread and butter or on a piece of meat and giving it to the animal to eat’ (Rolleston, 1943:303), while a Shropshire cure for the same malady entailed ‘holding a frog or toad for a few minutes in the child's mouth’, by which means ‘a cure would follow’ (ibid:304). Frogs do not seem to get an easy time of it; in Kent, toothache was thought to ‘be cured by spitting into a frog's mouth and bidding it make off with the pain’ (Selare, 1939:354).
