Horehound
My grandfather, Emmet P. Shields, was born in in 1893 in Rogersville Maryland and remembered being dosed with “teas” for fevers, coughs, and injuries. Boneset and ditney brought frowns to his face. He loved pennyroyal. Horehound provoked mixed reactions. “When I had a chest cold I would get dosed with Dr. Allen’s Balasam of Horehound , and it was dark vile stuff. But at the store they had horehound candy. I wanted to get dosed with that.”
I knew the candy well. My family had a habit of going to historic sites, and there would invariably a store with “historic goods,” including the inevitable glass jar of dark horehound candies. They were not wrapped then. The first time I saw them, I thought they were root beer candy because of the darkish red color. But the taste was different—maltier. I suspect that for most people in the United States who have tasted horehound, it has been as a hard candy. Perhaps the most tradition supplier of the candy is Claeys, a company that has sold the herbal candy since 1919. The Vermont Country Store sells it too. The old timey softdrink, “Horehound Beer,” (2% alcohol) is currently offered by Percy Pught.
The plant is rather handsome, with downy grey foliage, crimped around the leaves. It is a perennial, and was introduced into the Western Hemisphere early during the settlement period. In some places (California for instance) it has naturalized and become invasive. The seeds are hooked hitchhikers that will snag hold of your socks and pants. The illustration that stands at the head of this piece shows a planting that grows in Santa Rosa, California. I sampled several leaves. They were strikingly bitter. The instant I tasted the plant, I remembered that it was one of the bittering herbs used in beer making before the Protestant Reformation made hops the chief herbal additive of beer. It occurs to me the story of Protestants promoting hops is a legend worth checking for its truth value. The myth holds that the Roman Catholic monasteries controlled the herbs that made up the gruit bundles steeped in the brew and made their formulae secret. The Protestants defied the monopoly by promoting their own bitter herb—hops. But now that I repeat the myth, it sounds rather hollow. There was no set-in-stone formula for gruit. And most frequent constituents of the herb bundles were common enough herbs in the 1400s and 1500s: yarrow, costmary, ground ivy, sweet gale, and horehound. There were others that sometimes appeared—Calluna heather, angelica root, caraway, anise and juniper berries. I knew sweet gale (Myrica gale) as bog myrtle. It is a root doctor plant in the American South. Costmary I encountered in Colonial Williamsburg and it smelled so like mint that I wondered why cultivate it when mint was so readily available. Yarrow was famous in earlier times for staunching blood. It stopped wounds from bleeding, or noses from seeping blood. The modest clusters of white and yellow blossoms were homely and charming.
Gruit beers and ales have enjoyed a revival in the craft beer renaissance. Horehound, as one of the easier of the old bittering herbs to source has found its way in numbers of these offerings. Try those that don’t add horehound or one of the other old herbs to a hopped base (one of the cheats among modern gruit brewers).
Marrubium supinum is called white horehound; black horehound is another species and does not have the rich history as apothecary confection or medicine. Horehound is a modest plant, attaining perhaps two feet of height. The paired leaves are oval with a toothed margin. The blossoms are white, forming at the juncture of the stem and leaf pairs. The plant enjoys partial shade in the garden, though will grow on poor soil if watered sufficiently and kept from great cold. The fresh leaves and stems are boiled in water until a strong decoction—horehound juice-is formed. One pint of this liquid extract is combined with at least eight pounds of sugar, and this mixture is boiled to a sludgy consistency, then poured into candy molds to set. This is horehound candy in its simplest form. The dried leaves and twigs are sometimes used to brew horehound tea, a bracingly bitter cup reputed to have strong tonic properties.
Horehound syrup is not used in classic American baking.