A few housewives’ remedies for curing ills
IN THE days before “miracle” drugs, invalids often spent weeks and even months convalescing from ailments that would nowadays be treated with a short course of antibiotics. Housewives were expected to be adept at home nursing and the most skilled often moved from home to home when illness struck.
Meanwhile, friends and neighbours vied to produce delicacies to tempt the sufferer’s poor appetite.
Books devoted to invalid cooking included snippets of garbled medical information and recipes for such unappetising dishes as gruel, broth, arrowroot, tripe, egg jelly and raw beef tea. Another “excellent and nourishing drink” consisted of a raw beaten egg mixed with a cup of milk, coffee or tea.
In published in 1902, the well-known cookery writer Hildagonda Duckitt (18391905) of Wynberg noted on February 9 that “poor J” had been very ill and her sister had struggled to get her to eat.
Hilda wrote: “I wanted to prepare something to tempt her and as she was ordered only to have something quite light, I thought first of getting some sweetbreads (delicately flavoured thymus and pancreas glands taken from calves or lambs), but they were very expensive, and so it occurred to me to try a recipe I have for cooking sheep’s brains, which are as light as sweetbreads and far less expensive.”
Having obtained six or eight brains for a shilling, Hilda or her maid washed them in cold water and applied boiling water to whiten them. “They are then dipped into egg and bread-crumbs, seasoned with pepper and salt, and fried for a few minutes in boiling dripping or butter until they are a light brown.”
This “delicate and tempting” dish proved a great success, for “J could not at first guess of what it was made”.
Another of Hilda’s strengthening recipes came from her childhood home, Groote Post, in the Darling district. It was for a nourishing soup for toddlers who appeared to be wasting away and its only ingredient was an “edible” tortoise.
This so-called “sculpatje” may have been a small turtle, for she notes elsewhere that her family used to get them from Saldanha Bay each September.
According to her, the local coloured people had great faith in the restorative powers of the soup, and she describes the preliminary steps in unsentimental (indeed brutal) terms. “To kill a tortoise, our old cook Abraham used to scratch its back, and when the tortoise put out its head he chopped it off.”
Following a good scrubbing, the unfortunate reptile was boiled until its parts separated, after which the broth was fed to the children and the legs and the liver were seasoned with lemon, salt and pepper and served to undernourished invalids with unpredictable results because as Hilda had the grace to admit, stewed tortoise was an acquired taste.