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The Still-Room

The Still-Room

The room where the still once stood, and the work that happened in it: plants gathered from the verge and the hedge, then turned to cordials, butters, wines and remedies. Wild garlic into oxymel, hawthorn flowers into butter, cowslips into a wine that emptied the meadows. The herbs come with the uses they were put to, before the chemist took them over.
23
May
Elder umbel in cream lace against a scrubbed kitchen board, jar of cordial syrup in the corner, morning light from the left.

The Elderflower Window: The Three Weeks That Shape the Still-Room Year

Elderflower carries the still-room year. The umbels hold their scent for about three weeks once they open, the work of cordial, vinegar and wine.
4 min read
23
May
Watercolour still life. A cream bowl of pale green gooseberry and elderflower fool on weathered wood, with green gooseberries, an elderflower head, and a fork on a linen napkin alongside.

Green Gooseberries: The Cooking Fruit of Late May

Hard, sour, the size of a marble. The green gooseberry is a cooking fruit, not a fresh one. Eliza Acton 1845 set the standard farmhouse method.
3 min read
23
May
Watercolour botanical study of wall pennywort on a West Country stone wall. Two colonies of round cupped leaves emerge from a mortar joint, with one slender flower spike and a fern frond.

Wall Pennywort: The Plant of the Old Stone Walls

Wall pennywort, the small fleshy plant of old stone walls. Children called it penny-pie; the doctrine of signatures named it navelwort.
3 min read
23
May
Watercolour of pale hawthorn butter wrapped in muslin and tied with string, partly cut into rounds, beside hawthorn blossom, a lemon and a pinch of salt.

Hawthorn Butter: The May Blossom in the Kitchen

Hawthorn blossom, the country child's hedge snack, folded into butter with lemon zest. Dorothy Hartley called the flower by its old name: May.
3 min read
23
May
Sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum) carpeting a beech wood floor in May: whorls of six to eight narrow leaves and clusters of small white four-petalled flowers.

Sweet Woodruff: The Woodland Plant That Smells of Hay

Sweet woodruff smells of nothing until dried. The coumarin in the leaves brings hay, vanilla, and almond. Maibowle is built around it.
3 min read
23
May
Two honey and lemon possets in pressed glass coupes on a stone windowsill with a halved lemon, ceramic honey bowl and dipper, thyme sprigs, and a silver spoon.

Lemon Posset: The Cream-Set Pudding and Its Older Hot Form

A posset began as hot milk curdled with wine or ale and prescribed for everything. Hannah Glasse's 1740s lemon version is its survivor.
4 min read
23
May
Wood sorrel growing at the base of a moss-covered tree root in dappled woodland shade, with heart-shaped leaves in groups of three and small white flowers with pink veining just open.

Salt of Sorrel: Wood Sorrel and the Iron-Mould Stain

Wood sorrel, sold from the seventeenth century as sal acetosella, lifts iron-mould stains from linen by chemistry that needs sunlight to finish.
4 min read
22
May
Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) in full white flower on an English lane verge in May, showing the hollow ridged bright green stems and finely divided leaves.

Cow parsley and hemlock – telling them apart on a May verge

Two waist-high white umbellifers flower on the same May verge. One is harmless cow parsley; the other is hemlock, which will kill you in a small enough dose.
4 min read
22
May
Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) in full yellow-green flower along the verges of a narrow Norfolk coastal lane in late April, with a line of sea in the middle distance.

Alexanders – the Lenten pot-herb of the coastal lane

Smyrnium olusatrum, once in every Lenten kitchen and now barely known – the umbellifer that tastes of celery, parsley, and asparagus.
4 min read
22
May
Sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) in full white flower against the shaded north side of a weathered cottage garden wall, with moss, lichen, and trailing ivy at the foot.

Sweet cicely – the cottage garden’s sugar saver

Myrrhis odorata, fern-leaved and aniseed-scented – the cottage garden's sugar saver before sugar was cheap, and still useful in the still-room.
3 min read