The apple-crazy time of year has returned. It's Honeycrisp season again - hurray! Plus, I hear Honeycrisp has a tasty new friend I've yet to meet, CandyCrisp. Not to be punny, but they sound Delicious!In reading up on the lore of apples, I've learned it all doesn't stop at "An apple a day keeps the doctor away."
Find some entertaining magical uses for apples here, but here are some for healthy livin'. Supposedly:
- To keep colds away for a year, eat an apple at midnight on Halloween.
- To keep up the strength, sniff an old sweet apple.
- To remove warts, rub the warts with an apple and bury it. When it rots, the warts will disappear.
- John Gerard, author of the famous Herbal of 1598, recommended a cosmetic salve to keep the skin soft and supple: apple pulp, lard, and rosewater. Known as pomatum (pomade), it was popular well into the nineteenth century.
I found a few additional pomade recipes online, for those of you who aren't Dapper Dan men. This one seems like it would be quite nice - excepting the ox marrow:Cantharides Pomade:
Ox marrow........ 300 drachms
White Wax......... 30 drachms
Mace oil........... 1 drachm
Clove oil........... 1 drachm
Rose essence or geranium oil....... 25 drops
Tincture of cantharides............. 8 drachms
*Who in the world is this Pomona? Amaze your friends:"Pomona was the Roman Goddess of fruit trees, especially of apple trees, and was also know as the “Apple Mother” who gave the “apples of eternal life.” Roman banquets ended with apples and an invocation of Pomona’s blessing."
3 comments:
The French word for apple is pomme. Interestingly, the French and German words for potato literally means "apple of the earth" (pomme de terre or erdapfel). Thus the French word for French fries, pommes frites, actually means fried apples, but is just short for friend apples of the earth! A little trivia for cyclocross season, where "pommes frites" are a staple of Belgian cylocross fans.
Oooo, yes! Je parle un peu de Francais - et vous?
Mais oui.
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