'Tis the Season to Get a Nagging Cough

In addition to Uncle Dan's meat-curing recipe, the 1907 Methodist cookbook at the Merrillville/Ross Township Historical Society museum includes a handwritten recipe for cough syrup. The ingredients include pressed horehound, water, sugar, lemon juice, and licorice.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Merrillville/Ross Township Historical Society.

This recipe leaves me with questions. First of all, what form did "pressed horehound" take? The directions — to boil it until "all the strength is out," then strain — suggest that we're dealing with dried herbs rather than a "cold-pressed" liquid infusion. Secondly, where did the pressed horehound come from? — was it commercially prepared and bought at the local store, or did the family grow the horehound in their garden and press it themselves? Did you pay a visit to the old lady down the street, who always had herbs on hand? Or did people normally have this stuff lying around in their pantries?

The "5¢ licorice piece" was evidently bought at the local store. Licorice has a history of medicinal use, but a lack of "high-quality evidence" to support such use. Horehound has a similar history, with a similar lack of scientific support.

Now I wonder, if the person making this concoction had to go to the grocery store anyway to get the two lemons, the licorice and/or the horehound, why didn't they just buy a pre-made patent cough syrup? But then I have to remind myself that — first, it may have been cheaper to prepare the syrup at home, and secondly, if you buy all the ingredients yourself, at least you know what's in the final product. When this cookbook was printed, the Pure Food and Drug Act was still in its infancy, having been passed in 1906. Your ordinary citizen of Merrillville in 1907 may have been aware of that buying a bottle of patent medicine was a roll of the dice.

And then, too, I suppose that when you go to all the trouble of putting these ingredients together and boiling them down to a syrup, you feel as if you are really doing something for the poor suffering cougher, even it's that cougher is yourself. The power of the placebo effect might extend to the person making the syrup as well as the person taking it: "You're coughing less now, dear." "Why, yes (cough, cough), that's true!"