Soup, Toddy and Turnips: 6 Folk Remedies for Winter Maladies

on

Do you seem to catch a cold every winter?  If so, you can take comfort in the knowledge that you're not alone - humans have been enduring this seasonal suffering for thousands of years.  Perhaps that's why there are so many folk remedies to winter ailments (some of which are a probably a bit more effective than others.)  Let's take a closer look at...

  • Chicken Soup
  • Hot Toddy
  • Staying Warm
  • Stale Ale and Spices
  • Gogl Mogl
  • Turnips Galore

Pile of turnips
Turnip syrup is a surprisingly widespread recommendation... (Zoshua Colah)

Chicken Soup

One folk remedy for the common cold is chicken soup. It's actually got a long history in medicine - the Chinese Huangdi Neijing (an ancient medical text with nebulous origins) describes chicken soup as a yang food, one that has energy-giving therapeutic properties.

The Greco-Roman Pedanius Dioscorides (a surgeon who served in the armies of Emperor Nero) speaks of it in his De materia medica, an incredibly influential pharmacopoeia (medical encyclopedia) that saw use for around 1,600 years.

Dioscorides describes how a broth made from old roosters and a generous helping of salt can be used for purging the body, and that sea colewort, mercury, cnicum (safflower or thistles) or polybody (a type of fern) can be included in the brew.  He claims that the resulting broth can draw out sticky, thick, gluey and black fluids, making it a good treatment for everything from the asthmatic and feverish to the arthritic.

Moses Maimonides (a 12th century rabbi and physician) also extolled the virtues of chicken soup - and varying other researchers have weighed in with possible therapeutic benefits, some serious, others satirical.

So can chicken soup actually have any real effect on the human body?  There's actually been a number of studies where researchers found...

  • Sipping hot chicken soup increased nasal mucous velocity (and thus helped clear airways.) Sipping hot water had a similar (but less dramatic) effect, while sipping cold water reduced nasal mucous velocity.
  • Chicken soup inhibited the movement of neutrophils (a type of white blood cell) when tested outside the human body.  Neutrophils are sometimes called the immune system's first line of defense - and unfortunately, they tend to cause a fair amount of collateral damage (along with additional inflammation) compared to the more specialized white blood cells that turn up later.  If chicken soup calms the neutrophils down, it could reduce the symptoms of a cold!

Of course, there is another option if you're not a fan of chicken soup - lizard soup.  The recipe favored in Hong Kong features dried lizards, yams and Chinese dates for a slightly sweeter brew!

Hot toddy alongside ingredients
Comforting, at least... (Misunderstood Whiskey)
Hot Toddy

It's probably no surprise that booze gets used as a winter remedy.  

The Victorian "Mrs Beeton's Book of Home Management" features one such cure, a hot toddy made from linseed, licorice, sun raisins, simmered and reduced in soft water.  The mixture is then sweetened with pounded sugar-candy, fortified with rum and cut with either white-wine vinegar or lemon juice.  Prepared and administered correctly, she avows that the drink will cure a cold in a matter of days.

A simpler and more traditional hot toddy recipe simple blends whiskey with honey, lemon, cloves, sugar and boiling water.  The origin of the "toddy" is actually a topic of dispute.  Depending on the teller, it may be derived from a Hindi word describing fermented palm-sap alcohol, the Irish Dr. Robert Bentley Todd (said to have prescribed brandy, sugar, cinnamon and hot water remedies) or even be a reference to Tod's Well in Edinburgh, Scotland.

If making a hot toddy sounds like too much effort, you might prefer a Korean concoction of Soju (a colorless spirit usually made from rice and similar to vodka) cut with spicy red pepper powder.  

So could these help you?  The answer is complicated.  To start with, lemons are a strong source of vitamin C (the red pepper in the Korean version also has some, but nowhere near as much as a fresh chili.)  The research suggests that vitamin C may help reduce the duration of colds (though not by an amazing amount) or even help ward off a cold in an extremely stressed patient (professional athletes, for example.)

That said, alcohol itself isn't a great idea when ill.  Sure, it might make you feel better for a while... but it also seems to have a disruptive effect on the immune system - something you'd probably want to avoid in a potential "remedy."

Staying Warm

A preventative measure rather than a remedy, it turns out that many people still believe that getting cold can result in catching a cold.

There's a few issues with this idea, and perhaps the most damning is that a cold is caused by one of many viruses - in fact, over two-hundred different respiratory viruses are known to cause colds, with the rhinovirus family being amongst the worst offenders.

Getting a cold is dependent on allowing one of these viruses to infect you - if you were kept in perfect isolation, you could get as cold as you liked for as long as you liked without catching one (though you might still experience hypothermia.)  In fact, an experiment at the British Common Cold Unit (yes, that was a real thing) monitored the health of three groups of volunteers who:
  1. Stood in a cold room in a wet bathing suit for half an hour
  2. Were inoculated with a cold-causing virus
  3. Stood in a cold room in a wet bathing suit for half an hour after being inoculated with a cold-causing virus

That said, there's some research suggesting a link between cold temperatures and catching a cold.  Rhinoviruses tend to like things a little bit cooler than the 37°C found in a health human core.  The nasal cavity tends to be a little bit cooler - a situation that can only be exacerbated by inhaling cold winter air.  Rhinoviruses seem to do best at around 33-35°C... and to make matters worse, our immune system is a little less effective at these temperatures as well.  It's even been suggested that the difference between the temperature in your nasal cavity and in your lungs is the only reason that colds can't become something altogether more lethal!

Bowl of broth with sliced chicken and vegetables
Chicken soups of all kinds have been used as winter remedies... (Melissa Walker Horn)

Stale Ale and Spices

Here's a 15th century cold cure straight from the Chancery of England (basically a writing house that dealt with royal and governmental decrees.)  It's not really clear how a home remedy ended up amidst these vaunted records - though it may simply have been swept up by mistake amidst other documents, leaving a sniffling clerk bereft of his intended relief!

The remedy in question is for "stoppyng in þe hedde and in the nose" or in other words, congestion.  It calls for stale ale (stale used to be synonymous with old ale in English brewing, meaning that it would be dark, malty and strong) mustard seeds and nutmeg to be ground up in a glass, then heated by being placed in a pan of boiling water.  The sufferer should then position their nose above the glass, while covering their head with cloth.  The remedy claims that doing so cause the corruption (mucus) to leave your head through the nose!

So would it have helped?  The answer is a rather nebulous maybe.  Many people still try inhaling steam as a way to deal with congestion in the modern era, though a review of the evidence suggests that there's no significant benefit (or harm) to doing so - unless you managed to scald yourself, of course!

In addition to the steam, mustard seeds can produce allyl isothiocyanate... which is a fairly potent irritant.  The infused steam may have made the inhaler's nose run, which might have seemed like "corruption" leaving the body... and the resulting placebo effect may have made them feel better.  Even more curiously, researchers have found that allyl isothiocyanate can help against some bacterial and viral infections!

Gogl Mogl

A drink or dessert with roots in Eastern Europe, the most common version of gogl mogl (there are a lot of variant spellings and names) consists of egg yolks mixed with sugar or honey before being beaten into hot milk.  It ended up becoming a popular folk remedy for colds and coughs amongst the Yiddish community.

Opinions vary on the concoction - some people describe it as a sweet treat, others as a cure worse than the disease.  Medically it probably has a mildly beneficial effect (though raw eggs are always a risk) as a thick, viscous liquid could coat and soothe an aggravated throat.  The real benefit is to be found in the high fat and sugar content - easily consumed fluids and calories are a boon to the sick!

Raw eggs
Would you risk salmonella for a cold remedy? (Georgia Durrant)

Turnips Galore

Here's one that seems a bit out of left field - as well as being a major food crop, turnips have a presence in folk medicine as a cold remedy.

Like the mustard mentioned earlier, turnips can produce isothiocyanates that can help counter bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms.

When it comes to folk remedies, turnips have been made into both decoctions and syrups to help treat respiratory infections.  The decoction is simpler, involving boiling chunks of turnip in milk (and potentially adding honey and grappa, a grape-based brandy.)  The syrup is a little fancier, with one method being to layer thin slices of turnip and brown sugar and leaving the stack overnight!

Another rather more complex method is Elizabeth Slany’s 18th century "Syrup of Turnips for a cold."  It calls for peeled and sliced turnips to be placed in a pot with maidenhair fern, scabious, agrimony, betony, rosemary, hart's tongue fern, liverwort, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, licorice, elicampane, and bruised aniseeds.  The whole mixture should be covered in dough and "baked with brown bread" before the turnip mixture is removed, mashed, strained through a cloth and mixed with sugar to create a syrup.  I suspect by the time all that had been accomplished, the patient would have recovered by themselves!

Turnips were also used as a cold remedy in Persia, served steamed with honey and spices or transformed into a honey-pot - created by hollowing out a turnip, filling it with honey and leaving it in a cool, dark place for several hours.  The hollow turnip should now contain a syrupy liquid, said to help with winter maladies!

Thanks for reading - for more, try...