Name: Carrick MacSeáin
Project: Making Medieval Medicine from Common Garden Plants
Location: Shire of Nordenhal
East Kingdom Wiki Link: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/wiki/Carrick_MacSeain
Category: Cooking and Brewing
Optional Additional Links: Medieval Medicines
Medicines in this project were derived by finding what plants could be locally foraged, researching the medicinal properties of these plants, and creating the period medicines from the recipes. During the research, some recipes surfaced that were too simple to not recreate, even if that meant using commercially sourced ingredients, such as the cinnamon in the toothache salve. Additionally, some ingredients were at hand already, such as the barley and salt in the “toothpaste”.
Decoctions were done using a coffee siphon, in lieu of a medieval pelican or distillation without a license, which is illegal in every state as of this writing. The principles are the same in that both devices will recirculate a liquid over the herbs and plant material to extract the essential medicinal effects.
Research shows that any type of mixing the herbs into any type of liquid would be expected to extract the medicinal elements of the material. Alcoholic beverages were commonplace in period, so one was created and used for these recipes; mead in this case. The mead was brewed by the author using locally sourced honey.
Recipes in this project were taken primarily from two sources: Bald’s Leechbook, and Dodoens’ Niewe Herball.
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