OLD-TIME HOME REMEDIES FOR THE FLU WITH GUEST AUTHOR DONIS CASEY

When award-winning author Donis Casey stops by for a visit, I know she’ll bring with her interesting tidbits about the early 20^th Century. Today she comes with with home remedies for the flu.

Donis writes the Alafair Tucker Mysteries, set in Oklahoma during the booming 1910s and featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children. The ninth book has recently been released. The first book in the series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, is currently available as a free download on iTunes. Learn more about Donis and her books at her website.

Your Mother's Home Remedies for the Flu

When I was writing my latest Alafair Tucker novel, The Return of the Raven Mocker, which is set during the great influenza pandemic of 1918, I spent a great deal of research time gathering old flu remedies, as well as early 20th Century recipes for foods and drinks for the sick. At the time of the pandemic, there were a lot of weird remedies in circulation in America, and more than a few people died from being dosed with turpentine, coal oil, mercury, ox bile, chicken blood, and other unmentionable home remedies they were given by their well-meaning caretakers. Some of the deaths in the epidemic were probably caused by aspirin poisoning rather than the disease. Aspirin was relatively new on the market, and folks may have figured that if a little aspirin was good for fever and aches, then eating whole handfuls every hour was even better if you were really sick.

My mother used to give us kids 7Up when we got sick, and I dearly wished I could have included that suggestion in my book, but of course 7Up wasn’t available when Alafair’s kids were young, so she had to make do with ginger tea. She could have given her patients ginger ale, but knowing Alafair, she wouldn’t buy soda pop when she could make something just as effective at home.

Ginger tea is practically a cure for nausea. Boil a slice of fresh ginger in a cup of water until the water turns golden and sip it hot. I like to sweeten mine with honey. Our foremothers knew all about the medicinal qualities of food. In early 20th Century America, every housewife had her arsenal of remedies for common ailments, and many of them worked. In fact, some of what I learned has come in handy over the past winter.

Garlic really does have antibiotic properties and was used a lot as a treatment during the 1918 flu outbreak. I found a recipe for garlic soup in an early 20th Century cookbook that was guaranteed to cure the flu. It called for 24 cloves of garlic to be simmered for an hour in a quart of water. That will kill any germ that dares to try to infect you.

Dry burned toast is excellent for an upset stomach and diarrhea. Well-cooked, soft rice is easy to digest, and if you simmer one part raw rice in seven parts liquid for forty minutes to an hour, the rice ends up creamy and soft and practically pre-digested. 

Onion is antibiotic as well. My great-grandmother swore that placing a bowl of raw onions in a sick room would absorb the ill humors that were floating around. (She also liked to put raw eggs in the corners to soak up bad juju.) Here is a story that was told to me by the man to whom it happened:  when he was a young boy, he developed such a severe case of pneumonia that the doctor told his mother that he was not going to survive. In an act of desperation, his mother sliced up a raw onion and bound it to the bottoms of his feet with strips of sheet, then put cotton socks on him. In the morning, his fever had broken, his lungs had cleared, and the onion poultice had turned black. Is that what saved him? I don’t know. But that didn’t keep me from using the idea in my novel.

In fact, I found a number of remedies that called for binding something to the feet. An 1879 cookbook that I've owned for years recommends taking a large horseradish leaf, placing it on a hot shovel to soften if, then folding it and fastening it to the hollow of the foot with a cloth bandage. I also found foot-poultice recipes that used burdock leaves, cabbage, and mullein leaves. All the above are guaranteed to “alleviate pain and promote perspiration”.

Chicken soup really, really does help. Your mother says so, and so does science.

The Return of the Raven Mocker

An Alafair Tucker Mystery

Raven Mocker is a Cherokee legend, an evil spirit who takes the form of a raven and takes wing at night to possess the sick and elderly and torment them until they die. When the Raven Mocker returns to Boynton, Oklahoma in the fall of 1918, he brings with him the great influenza pandemic that claimed fifty million lives all over the world. World War I is still raging in Europe, but Alafair Tucker is fighting her own war as the epidemic sweeps through like wildfire. What a perfect time for someone to commit murder. Who’s going to notice?

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#COOKING WITH CLORIS--GUEST AUTHOR DONIS CASEY AND WAR CAKE

Award-winning author Donis Casey has written eight Alafair Tucker Mysteries. Her series, featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children, is set in Oklahoma and Arizona during the booming 1910s. Learn more about Donis and her books at her website and the Type M 4 Murder blog.  

The eighth Alafair Tucker Mystery, All Men Fear Me, was released this month. The saga of Alafair Tucker and her family, which began in 1912, has now progressed to the year 1917. By now four of Alafair’s daughter are married, there are four grandchildren, and the community of Boynton, Oklahoma, has almost recovered from the devastating tornado of the previous summer. Life would be wonderful if it were not for the fact that the United States has recently declared war on Germany, and if Alafair didn’t have two well-grown sons who are both eager to do their duty.

All Men Fear Me is not about the life of a soldier, though, or what is going on in Europe. All Men Fear Me is about the American home front. The war had a huge impact on daily life for ordinary people, even in the far reaches of eastern Oklahoma. But even more than bond drives and the loss of civil liberties, Alafair’s daily life is affected by the war’s impact on dinner.

In 1917, the United States Food Administration was headed by a young man named Herbert Hoover. He was charged with making sure that all American housewives were doing their part for the war effort. “Our problem,” said the USFA, “is to feed our Allies by sending them as much food as we can of the most concentrated nutritive value in the least shipping space. These foods are wheat, beef, pork, dairy products, and sugar. Our solution is to eat less of these…and to waste less of all foods.”

Every housewife was encouraged to use as little of the aforementioned foodstuffs as possible. There are several surviving war cookbooks that show women how to make meals for their families without using wheat, or meat, or sugar. I’ve tested out many old recipes in the course of writing this series. Our modern tastes are different from our ancestors’, and sometimes the old dishes are so heavy and rich that a bite or two is all we can take.

But when I made the following recipe for War Cake, which I found in a 1918 USFA publication called War Economy in Food, the reviews from my test eaters were very good. The cake is dense and moist and even though it has no ginger, it reminds me of gingerbread. The following recipe is taken directly from the booklet. It’s easy to make and delicious. But be warned, it is not low in calories.

War Cake

1 cup molasses*

1 cup corn syrup**

1-1/2 cup water

1 package raisins*** (exact quantity according to preference)

2 T fat (vegetable oil)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp cloves

1/2 tsp nutmeg

3 cups rye flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

Boil together for 5 minutes the first nine ingredients. Cool, add the sifted dry ingredients and bake in two loaves for 45 minutes in a moderate oven. (I baked it at 350º F. – Donis)

*There is more than one kind of molasses. I think the cake tastes better when it’s made with light molasses rather than blackstrap.

**I usually use Karo Syrup, which is corn syrup, but I have also substituted maple syrup, agave syrup, honey, and a combination thereof for the 1 cup of corn syrup. The maple syrup is especially delicious. 

           

***I prefer to use golden raisins, both for the look and the taste.

All Men Fear Me

An Alafair Tucker Mystery

The U.S. has finally entered the First World War and scheduled the first draft lottery. No one in Boynton, Oklahoma, is unaffected by the clash between rabid pro-war, anti-immigrant "patriots" and anti-conscription socialists, who are threatening an uprising rather than submit to the draft. Alafair Tucker is caught in the middle when her brother, a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, pays her a visit. 

Rob Gunn is fresh out of an internment camp for participants in an Arizona miners’ strike. He assures Alafair that he's only come to visit family, but she's not so sure. More unsettling, Alafair's eldest son enlists, and a group calling itself the “Knights of Liberty” vandalizes the farm of Alafair’s German-born son-in-law. 

Alafair’s younger son, 16-year-old Charlie, is wildly patriotic and horrified by his socialist uncle. With his father's permission Charlie takes a part-time war job at the Francis Vitric Brick Company. Soon several suspicious machine breakdowns delay production, and a couple of shift supervisors are murdered. Everyone in town suspects sabotage, some blaming German spies, others blaming the unionists and socialists. But Charlie Tucker is sure he knows who the culprit is and comes up with a plan to catch him red-handed. And then there is old Nick―a mysterious guy in a bowler hat who's been hanging around town.

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MONEY MATTERS WITH SHEILA--GUEST AUTHOR DONIS CASEY

Donis Casey is the author of the award-winning Alafair Tucker Mystery series, featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children. The series is set in Oklahoma and Arizona during the booming 1910s. Today Donis stops by to tell us a bit about how women cleaned their homes back before all those cleaning products that now line the supermarket shelves were available. Want to save money? Give some of these a try. Learn more about Donis and her books at her website.

Keeping It Clean

Imagine this:

It’s 1915 and you are a forty-year-old married woman who lives on a farm in rural eastern Oklahoma, in a one thousand square foot house with two bedrooms. You have ten children, ranging in age from two to twenty-four, to feed, clothe, and educate, not to mention animals and crops to care for and very little money.

In the spring and summer, and most of the autumn, every unscreened window and door in the house is open, and the husband and kids and their dogs and whatever other wildlife that take a notion, troop in and out at will.

There is no such thing as a supermarket, and even if there were, there is no Lemon Pledge, Tide laundry detergent, Mop ‘n’ Glo, Mr. Clean, Tilex, or Shout--or vacuum cleaners. Not that you could use one since you have no electricity, or indoor plumbing for that matter.

How on earth do you keep things clean, sanitary, and pest-free?

This is the fight that my sleuth, Alafair Tucker, wages every day of her life. It wasn’t so long ago that housekeeping was a full-time profession and required years of training and immense skill, not just in dusting, scrubbing, and sweeping, but in making your own cleaning products from scratch and knowing just when and how to use them.

           

My own grandparents lived on a subsistence farm in Oklahoma when I was growing up. I witnessed my grandmother washing clothes in an iron kettle over a fire in her back yard. She’d stir the clothes and linens around in the boiling cauldron with a sawed-off broom handle, transfer them to a tub of clean rinse-water, then carefully wring them out to hang on the line or drape over bushes. After she was done, she used the wash water to scrub down the back porch.

Until I began writing about the daily one-foot-in-front-of-the-other details of farm life, it didn’t occur to me to wonder what she used for detergent, or starch, or bleach. In fact, she made her own soap. She had a contraption called a “leach” made of boards with slits in the bottom that she filled with slaked lime, wood ash, and boiling water. The resulting liquid that dripped through the slits into a tub was lye. She used straight lye in water to scrub down the outhouse twice a day. She boiled up a portion of the lye water with fat and washing soda, which hardened and made soap. She shaved bits of the lye soap into the laundry tub to wash her clothes. 

I do a lot of traditional research. But many of the details of Alafair’s life on the farm, such as using kerosene-soaked corn cobs to start a fire, I learned from my mother, who grew up on a farm during the Depression. I keep a notebook and file full of information that I read up on as I need it. I know how to do laundry in an iron kettle, how to make household cleaning products, how to grow and put up vegetables, and how to slaughter a hog and preserve every last bit of the carcass. Not that I need to, thank goodness, but I know how it’s done.

Aside from my own memory and the memories of many of my older relatives, much of my information comes from reprints of the original books and pamphlets on housewifery that were rife in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. My two favorite references are a 1983 reprint of The Original White House Cookbook, first published in 1887, and a gorgeous copy of Housekeeping in Old Virginia,1879, which was given to me by Margaret Maron, whose country background is similar to mine.

Before the dawn of Dawn and other commercially made cleaning products, here is what every well-equipped American housewife had in her larder—

~A bottle of liquid ammonia. A few drops in water could wash windows, clean silver, get the grease off dishes, whiten the laundry, wash the walls, and remove stains.

~A box of powdered alum. Dissolved in water and applied boiling hot to bedsteads, cracks and crevices in floors and walls, alum would repel any bug you’d like to name.

~Borax powder, which is a great cleaner, but also softens laundry, repels insects, and you can use it to wash your hair.

~A big jug of vinegar with the “mother” (the lees floating at the bottom of the jar), for cleaning and disinfecting as well as adding a spark to a dish of turnip greens. My grandmother would scrub down all the surfaces in her house with hot vinegar when there was sickness in the family.

~A bottle of turpentine. Our foremothers used turpentine for things that would now be considered shocking and dangerous, such as medicine for a sore throat or to clean wounds. But it was also useful as an ingredient in cleansers. Mix a little turpentine oil with lampblack and polish your shoes. A cupful in a tub of cold water sets dark-colored dyes in clothing. Rub down your bedsteads with turpentine every spring to repel bedbugs. Just don’t smoke in bed afterwards.

Before

After

I do test some of these cleaning products before I write about them, if I can obtain the ingredients and don’t think I’ll poison myself. One very common recipe I’ve come across is for a furniture cleaner. It consists of one part linseed oil, one part vinegar, and one part turpentine. I have an ancient mahogany side table, worse for wear, that I inherited from my mother. It’s all scratched up from many years in homes with kids, so I decided that it couldn’t be hurt much more if I used it to experiment with the homemade furniture cleaner. I didn’t have any turpentine in the house and I probably wouldn’t have used it if I had. So I just mixed up a little oil and vinegar and gave the table a good rub. It wasn’t a miracle, but to my amazement, the table looks much better than it does when I polish it with Pledge. And I had enough furniture cleaner left over to dress a salad.

Hell With the Lid Blown Off

In the summer of 1916, a big twister brings destruction to the land around Boynton, OK.  Alafair Tucker’s family and neighbors are not spared the ruin and grief spread by the storm.  But no one is going to mourn for Jubal Beldon, who made it his business to know the ugly secrets of everyone in town. It doesn’t matter if Jubal’s insinuations are true or not. In a small town like Boynton, rumor is as damaging as fact.

But as Mr. Lee the undertaker does his grim duty for the storm victims, he discovers that even in death Jubal isn’t going to leave his neighbors in peace.  He was already dead when the tornado carried his body to the middle of a fallow field. Had he died in an accident or had he been murdered by someone whose secret he had threatened to expose? There are dozens of people who would have been happy to do the deed, including members of Jubal’s own family.

As Sheriff Scott Tucker and his deputy Trenton Calder look into the circumstances surrounding Jubal’s demise, it begins to look like the prime suspect may be someone very dear to the widow Beckie MacKenzie, the beloved music teacher and mentor of Alafair’s daughter Ruth.  Ruth fears that the secrets exposed by the investigation are going to cause more damage to her friend’s life than the tornado. Alafair has her own suspicions about how Jubal Beldon came to die, and the reason may hit very close to home.

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