Seasonal Sweets - Thyme & Aniseed Cough Drops

Cough drop ingredients; drying cough drops (on the tea towel); drops being rolled in icing sugar; and drops stored in jars.

 
I haven't been doing much gardening (or blogging) lately because I have been suffering from a seasonal lurgy. Ten days ago I started a cold which didn't block my nose too much but gave me a terribly itchy throat for several days. It was impossible not to cough – and then my head hurt something dreadful.

I consulted my copy of the fantastic resource book Grow your own drugs: A Year With James Wong (full of delicious as well as healing ways of using edible plants) for phytotherapies that might help, and discovered that I was several months too late to put together any involving elderberries, hollyhock flowers, honeysuckle or jasmine, and that as I had neglected to grow any echinacea plants I was out of luck there as well. I did have sage leaves and marigold (calendula) petals, which were half of the ingredients required to make a sage and marigold gargle for sore throats. Alas, a major ingredient for this is vodka, which I did not have on hand, and also this is a recipe which takes 10-14 days to make, for the herbs have to marinate in the vodka.

I made them into a tea instead, steeping them for ten minutes in a china pot, and found that it was a very soothing sip – and went surprisingly well with the heavy-duty garlic toast which I ate for breakfast and morning tea. (Garlic toast = 1 slice of toast, 1 tsp butter or olive oil, and as much garlic as you care to crush into the butter or oil before spreading it on the toast. The more the better – and leave the crushed garlic to 'mellow' for at least ten minutes before eating it as it needs this time to develop all its good properties.)

The other ingredient which I had grown myself (from seed last year) which was plentiful was thyme, so I had a go at making Thyme and Aniseed Cough Drops. It wasn't too difficult, and they make a nice change from commercial cough drops. They don't taste anything like them, and they seem to work on the throat at least as well. I have not yet mastered the art of making even-sized drops, or working fast enough to get all the mixture out of the pot before it passes the toffee stage, but even so I got some forty usable drops from the recipe below – plenty for me and for a friend who is also coughing her head off.

Thyme and Aniseed Cough Drops

(thanks to James Wong)

Ingredients

6-8 T fresh thyme leaves

4 t aniseeds (the small seeds, not star anise)

400 ml cold water

400 g sugar

icing sugar

Method

Put the thyme leaves and aniseeds in a pot with the water.

Bring to the boil, take it off the heat, and leave for 15 minutes to infuse.

Strain the liquid off the herbs into a clean pot, and add the sugar.

Bring it to the boil, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon, then boil until the mixture is thick enough to leave a thread coming off the spoon. (Take care, as molten sugar is very hot and can inflict bad burns.)

Put a pan of cold water (I used a roasting pan) beside the stove and, working quickly, drop teaspoons of the hot sugar mix into the pan. They will set into small, flat discs. Take them out immediately, and leave them to dry on a clean, dry tea towel.

When dry, roll them in sifted icing sugar, and store them in a tightly sealed container.