February 17th, that'll be 'World Cabbage Day' again. Last year on this occasion I posted some of Cato's enthusiastic 'In Praise of Cabbages'. Here are just a few additional uses to which Pliny the Elder suggests that the brassica may be put.
"... this plant is a remedy for flatu-lency, melancholy, and recent wounds, if applied with honey, and not taken off before the end of six days: beaten up in water, it is also for scrofula and fistula ... We will add only one more proof of the virtues of the cabbage, and that a truly marvellous one - in all vessels in which water is boiled, the incrustations which adhere with such tenacity that it is otherwise impossible to detach them, will fall off immediately if a cabbage is boiled therein."
2 comments:
A remedy for lack of flatulency, more like!
A cure for flatulency? Hmmmmm. Maybe he was eating some different cabbage than I do.
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