I just love it when I find an herbal book at a flea market, used book store or other spot, and it turns out to be a treasure. So it is with a recent find, The Complete Book of Herbs and Spices by Sarah Garland. This book is just full of useful recipes for using herbs and spices in cooking, cosmetics, soaps, herbal remedies, dyeing and much more. There are lovely botanical watercolors and photographs throughout with wonderful diagrams also. The history and traditions section and the monographs are very good also.
Lily and I decided to try this nice recipe for making Horehound toffee, from the book. We really like it and think you will also:)
Horehound Toffee
3 sprigs of horehound (ours has already been harvested and dried so we decided to use 2 tablespoons to make it nice and strong with the medicinal qualities so we can use our candy as cough helpers also)
2/3 cups soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons of molasses
the juice of 1/2 orange
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
Pour 1 1/4 cups boiling water over the horehound and leave to infuse for 30 minutes
Strain, pressing to extract the juice. Pour the liquid into a heavy pan and add the remaining ingredients.
Stir to dissolve, bring to a boil and boil fast until a drop hardens in cold water. Pour the liquid onto an oiled marble slab or baking sheet (we buttered ours)
the instructions then say to mark out squares with the tip of a sharp knife. When it is cool and brittle, break it and store in an airtight container. We didn’t have the best of luck scoring it, so we just cut it up rather randomly with scissors before it was brittle, then tossed powdered sugar over them:) YUM, good medicine that tastes good too!
Herbal and Honey hugs to all who visit Comfrey Cottages
