Maddie Salters discovers fantastic mastic!
It is often said you are what you eat. So there’s reason enough to focus on healthy foods.
In Crete, land of dittany, that is precisely what they do – taking the effort almost to an extreme, and producing their own medicines even. We were treated to a traditional medicine-making class, to learn how Greeks; both of yore and of right now; make cough syrups and throat drops that clear congestion and fight coughs.
The base of Greek cough syrups is, you guessed it, grapes. But for those of us who have visions of wine or dimetapp dancing in our head, the process is a little bit different. Grapes are boiled for hours over a very low flame until an herby syrup is created. It smells of thyme and tastes incredibly rich. Adding a bit of natural brown sugar to it gives it a maple undertone. This serves as the base of any medication, and what home-brewers heat and add ingredients to.
The herbologist (not just the stuff of Harry Potter anymore), as she began to mix her remedy over a small copper pot, informed us: “When making medicine, always use fire. The elements of nature go well together.”
Forgoing electric stoves, it was time to make this brew truly magical: we added thyme (to open the lungs), honey flower (for an itchy throat), white rose seeds (for the flavonoids), lemongrass, cinnamon, and carnation (all for taste and as boosters). To make cough drops rather than a syrup, it’s important to add some mastic gum to solidify the mix, as well as ginger and lemon, and to pour it out onto in dollops onto wax paper and pepper it with powdered sugar– yum!
My favourite part about this was how herbal it tasted. There was nothing chemical about it, it seemed easy enough to complete, needing only fire and a mortar and pestle. Only drawback? Most of the extra ingredients are best-found in Crete, which has over 300 indigenous herbs that don’t grow elsewhere. Reason enough to go abroad if you feel the winter flu creeping up on you during your daily commute.
Best of All: Fantastic Mastic! Mastic gum, which has a light pine taste, used to be chewed by the ancient Greeks to clean the teeth. I’m obsessed: it tastes great, is all-natural, has no sugar, and never loses elasticity. If you don’t plan to melt it down into medicine, definitely keep it in mind as a plaque-clearing guilt-free gum.
Pro Tip: If you plan to make your own medicine, always use a wooden spoon, and while you stir, make a wish. An old wive’s tale says that to assure your concoction carries a prophecy of good health, you have to have good intentions going into it too.
Read more posts in Maddie’s Crete Eats series.
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