Simples

[MaC]

Simples is the older name for basic everyday 'lotions and potions' that any good housewife ought to be familiar enough with to make as necessary.
Modern chemist shops and industrialisation more or less killed the receipt books.

I find them a quiet pleasure to make and to use. I have reams of them

Anyway, clearing out notebooks, and I keep coming across the ones I've written in them.
I thought I'd start a thread and share some.

 

[MaC]

Chickweed Salve

Used to soothe itching caused by insect bites, rashes on unbroken skin, and other minor skin irritations....quite good for hangnails too.

2 parts chickweed
2 parts plantain
1 part comfrey leaves
Olive oil
Grated beeswax

Looks simple, but it needs attention to make it properly. That said, it's one of those sort of recipes that just gets done bit by bit through the day, so no bother really.

Gather a good handful of each of those herbs (doesn't seem to matter which plantain, ribwort or otherwise), wash them in clean water and then lay them out to dry off and wilt.
Tear them up pretty small and 'guess-timate' the quantities. I generally go by the tight handful for this one.
The chickweed will wither down to not a lot so you need to pick a lot more of it than you do the plantain, kind of thing.....not that it's hard to get enough chickweed when it's infesting a flower bed

Anyway, once it's torn up you need to extract the 'goodness' in warm oil.
So, put enough olive oil into a pot that will just cover the wilted herbs....I find it's generally a fair bit less than a cupful.
In the past folks put it outside in the sunshine, it works in a jar just fine, but right now there's a dearth of sunshine in my sodden wet bit of the world, so the pot is put onto the heat as low as I can manage and it's left to gently stew for a couple of hours.
Leave it overnight, then strain.....I buy gents hankies in the sales and use them for this sort of thing, but a few layers of kitchen towels will work, just kind of messy, because it needs to be squeezed. You can line a sieve and press down on the herbs with a spoon to get as much out as possible.

This is known as an infused oil and it's a basic thing used to make many, many recipes.

Beeswax is a hard wax and it takes a lot of heat to melt, so sunshine won't do. Grate it up or scrape or slice it down with a knife, because it'll melt more easily that way. The oil and the wax need to be at the same temperature to mix properly.
If you don't you'll get hard bits of wax floating around in a not quite hard enough ointment.

Pyrex and the microwave are your friend these days I used to have to skiddle around with bain marie and hot water and yeah, fuss and bother. I just use wee pyrex dishes, or old mugs and the microwave heats it all up nicely.
Better yet if you have a wee jar and that jar is the one you're going to store the cream in, totally mess free

We're aiming for a salve, something that we can gently rub in, not some thing hard enough to polish boots, so, for every six tablespoonsful of oil you can add one of melted beeswax, and stir gently until it all cools down...you can put the mug/jar/whatever into cool water to speed that up if you like.

These days we can buy Vitamin E capsules...that stuff is good for skin, gently preservative, etc., and if you choose you might add the contents of one or two to your infused oil just before you add the beeswax and stir. Not necessary, but a sort of modern addition to an old recipe. That's the point when you can add essential oils of choice too.....such as a few drops of birch to make that amazing Nordic Summer or Smidge stuff

M

 

[noddy]

Much improved with eye of newt.

 

[Jaggededge]

Growing up everything was treated with a smack round the head or a kick up the arse.

 

[bushwacker]

Mercury down your japs eye cures s.t.ds

 

[MaC]

Much improved with eye of newt.

Eye of newt was a code for mustard seed.....not really something one wants in a soothing salve. Fine for a backache kind of heatening one or for drawing a messy cyst though.

 

[MaC]

Smidge

This is a stupidly simple recipe....if Xylaria were still selling it I wouldn't write it here, but she appears to have disappeared somewhere in Portugal...

6 tablespoonsful of corn oil, or olive, or British rapeseed.
1 tablespoonful of grated beeswax.

Melt the wax in a wee tin or jar; heat the oil to the same temperature range, then mix the two and stir well. Remove from any source of heat and add 4 drops of birch tar essential oil....you can just use birch tar, but it's easier and cheaper just buying a wee bottle of the essential oil on eBay for a couple of quid. That will keep you in soap and anti insect stuff for years...... and stir while it cools.
It can be poured into small tins (again, available on eBay) just before it sets.

Birch Tar Soap or Pine Soap

Plain soap, doesn't need to be fancy, but I like quality in my soap, so I use Castille.
I make soap and you can buy a block of basic 'melt and pour' by the kg if you don't want to faff around with lye, etc., and that melt and pour will work fine. It's not expensive and you'll end up with far too much soap !

Ordinary soap will work fine. Cut it up, grate it if you can be bothered. Put it in a pyrex jug in the micro, or an old pan on the cooker, heat gently.
Add a teaspoonful of water if you've heated it enough to steam, remove from the heat and stir in eight drops of birch tar or pine essential oil, stir and cool. Use a silicon spatula to scrape it out and into something that will mould a bar again.....a cut down yoghurt tub lined with tinfoil works, a philadephia tub, just something you can lift the soap out of easily once it sets again.

The birch tar will make the soap harden really quickly so be aware and don't hang around with moulding it.

If your soap or smidgy isn't smokey enough to suit, you can just melt it down again and add extra oomph as required

It's simple

 

[bushwacker]

is birch tar the same stuff as stockholm tar?

 

[MaC]

is birch tar the same stuff as stockholm tar?

Plain birch tar can be made by simply rolling up birch bark, keep the grain downwards because you want it to drip, and putting it into a tin. Pop the tin in a low-ish oven and it will drip. The trick is to get the runny tar and not boil off the phenols, etc.,

Stockholm tar is made by excluding all oxygen from the heating wood; dry distillation, if I recall correctly. It doesn't lose any of those phenol bits

They are to some extent interchangeable, but by heavens you'll stink if you use stockholm tar on an ointment
We use it on the boats and the ropes and bumpers, and just having one (we were doing a ropemaking course with Des Pawson) in the car to bring it home from Glasgow had my car smell of it for a year !

Stockholm tar is relatively cheap to buy in comparison though. ....if you want quantity, that is.

 

[Greg]

But how much is my car insurance going to be?

 

[MaC]

Draw Salves

These encourage the removal of skelfs (splinters) the remains of beestings, draw the pus out of whitlows and boils.

Basically there are two types.
The first is made much like the salves above, but has added oils that encourage healing as well as killing bugs.
The second is a drawing paste that works by drawing moisture from the wound and thus encourages the removal of pus and anything that causes that pus.

The recipe for the first type is simply oil and beeswax, chickweed, comfrey and plantain, but with oils of wintergreen, camphor, eucalyptus, pine and lavendar added.

Thing is though; not many households have all those oils immediately to hand, but pine is pretty ubiquitous here, so take some fresh pine needles or green cones and bash them and then stew them in oil for a couple of hours. If you have lavender in the garden do it with that too. It's not essential oil, but it's infused oil and it will do the job. If you have bog myrtle to hand ....as one does ....it's also very good in the mix.

The second recipe is magnesium sulphate paste but instead of being mixed with water, it is much the better being mixed with glycerine, or failing that, honey. Mix it up to make a thickish paste that you can cover with either a big elastoplast or a folded pad of something like paper hankie or kitchen towel and duct tape. Leave it on over night and it will help a lot

 

[MaC]

Electuary
This is ground herbs mixed with honey to make a paste. The honey makes often unpalatable mixtures easy to swallow.

Carminatives are a good example of this. These help reduce flatulence, ease painful wind. The mix can be dissolved in boiling water and drunk like a spiced Indian tea.
Much easier using pre-ground herbs/spices, but can be done from the whole ones which are best roasted, cooled and ground up in either a mortar or a coffee grinder (mind it'll kind of taint the grinder though ! )

Again, it's proportional. The tiniest little spoon in the measuring spoon set, the pinch, is about a sixteenth of a teaspoonful.

if you're just making one cup worth then use that, if you're making enough to store in a jar in the fridge (lasts for months) then use a teaspoon instead.

1 part ground ginger
1 part cloves
1 part coriander seed
1 part cinnamon
2 parts black peppercorn (if using fresh; if using ground quarter that)
2 parts fennel seeds
3 parts cardamom
3 parts turmeric
Good pinch of salt.


Mix well, then add honey to make a paste. I like honey, and usually make something like a 10 part addition to mine. So if I've used a teaspoon, that's what I use for the honey.
Stir well and set aside. It works really well if gently warmed up and let stew, so set the bowl into another one of hot water for a bit, or just nuke it in the microwave (modern witchcraft )

This recipe makes a decent spiced tea, but you can just swallow a teaspoonful at a time. It's quite nice on a sort of 'hot throat' too, not just as an ease for windy guts.

 

[E. By Gum]

Ta, some interesting stuff there. I have a recipe for four winds tea, for flatulence. Not sure I have found it effective though.

 

[E. By Gum]

It's equal parts caraway seed, fennel seed, chopped peppermint leaf and chamomile flowers, plus hot water. A teaspoon of each in the recipe given.

 

[bushwacker]

Electuary
This is ground herbs mixed with honey to make a paste. The honey makes often unpalatable mixtures easy to swallow.

Carminatives are a good example of this. These help reduce flatulence, ease painful wind. The mix can be dissolved in boiling water and drunk like a spiced Indian tea.
Much easier using pre-ground herbs/spices, but can be done from the whole ones which are best roasted, cooled and ground up in either a mortar or a coffee grinder (mind it'll kind of taint the grinder though ! )

Again, it's proportional. The tiniest little spoon in the measuring spoon set, the pinch, is about a sixteenth of a teaspoonful.

if you're just making one cup worth then use that, if you're making enough to store in a jar in the fridge (lasts for months) then use a teaspoon instead.

1 part ground ginger
1 part cloves
1 part coriander seed
1 part cinnamon
2 parts black peppercorn (if using fresh; if using ground quarter that)
2 parts fennel seeds
3 parts cardamom
3 parts turmeric
Good pinch of salt.


Mix well, then add honey to make a paste. I like honey, and usually make something like a 10 part addition to mine. So if I've used a teaspoon, that's what I use for the honey.
Stir well and set aside. It works really well if gently warmed up and let stew, so set the bowl into another one of hot water for a bit, or just nuke it in the microwave (modern witchcraft )

This recipe makes a decent spiced tea, but you can just swallow a teaspoonful at a time. It's quite nice on a sort of 'hot throat' too, not just as an ease for windy guts.

plus 1 tsp of chilli and we have a decent curry

 

[Stew]

Asafoetida is a good addition to help combat flatulence!

 

[MaC]

No getting away from it, but lanolin has a smell, a smell of sort of damp sheep, but it's a truly brilliant emollient and is one of the best things for dry hands, cracked skin and hacks.

The greasiness though can make handling anything afterwards a mess, so it's more usual to mix it into a cream. The problem with that is that creams without preservatives can go bad and become breeding grounds for bacteria.
These days folks add stuff like Optiphen plus, in the past we used benzoin, but that's apparently contra indicated these days.
Best advice is make it up and use it up. Don't keep it hanging around, don't share the jar with anyone else's dirty fingers. Keeping it in the fridge just makes it harder to rub into your skin.

This one really does work best with a bain marie of some kind. I bought cheap stainless steel pots in Ikea and use them for stuff like this, but you can do it in a washed out tin can and just set that into a pan with hot water...put the can in the pot on top of a jam jar lid or something similar, you just need to keep it off the bottom of the water pot a little.

4 tablespoonsful of Lanolin
4 tablespoonsful of Sweet Almond Oil
2 teaspoonsful of grated beeswax

Melt these all together and then beat it like you would eggs while stirring in
4 tablespoonsful of orange water and
6 drops of sandalwood or bergamot essential oil.

Take off the heat and keep stirring until it cools....again you can speed this up by putting the pot/can into the sink with cold water.

I use a whisk and just keep going until the mix looks like cream and doesn't want to seperate out.

It's a good one for playing around with different waters and oils. I added a tablespoonful of vodka once hoping to get some preservation, it seemed to work.

It's a nice recipe with rosewater and lavender and vanilla too.

 

[MaC]

I was just about to write out a recipe for a leather balm, when I remembered a post on Leatherworker....and I reckon he says it better than I would, so, here's a link and a suggestion for a sit down and a read over a coffee

An actual Leather Conditioner recipe

Having spent a good deal of time researching and reading forums, to include this one, I have found that there are plenty of threads on making leather conditioners , but not many actual recipes. People act like its a secret or are elusive in what ingredients and ratios they use. Its not a secret, ...

leatherworker.net

 

[Winnet]

Have you posted anything about cleaning leather that I have completely missed?

G

 

[BorderReiver]

I was just about to write out a recipe for a leather balm, when I remembered a post on Leatherworker....and I reckon he says it better than I would, so, here's a link and a suggestion for a sit down and a read over a coffee

An actual Leather Conditioner recipe

Having spent a good deal of time researching and reading forums, to include this one, I have found that there are plenty of threads on making leather conditioners , but not many actual recipes. People act like its a secret or are elusive in what ingredients and ratios they use. Its not a secret, ...

leatherworker.net

Is this stuff (not read the article yet) for soft leather items only, or is it safe for boots?

 

[MaC]

Safe for boots, but check your thread. Some of the modern threads say not to use dubbin...and though this stuff isn't technically 'dubbin' it's an oil or wax kind of mixture. Depending on the finish of the boots the manufacturers seem to recommend silicon instead.

I don't feel that silicon feeds the leather, but it does do well with nylon thread and coloured finishes.

 

[MaC]

Have you posted anything about cleaning leather that I have completely missed?

G

I haven't yet, but if you want leather soap, I'll find my recipes

 

[Winnet]

Please, that would be great. Dad's favourite chair is a leather one that needs a good clean between spilt food, drinks and I choose not to think about the marks where his head normally rests.

G

 

[MaC]

Please, that would be great. Dad's favourite chair is a leather one that needs a good clean between spilt food, drinks and I choose not to think about the marks where his head normally rests.

G

Leather soaps come in really two varieties.
The first one is the one that's used to clean horse harness and the like. More usually called Saddle soap. It cleans but it oils too, if I make myself clear ?
But horse sweat and mud are different from food.....so,
The second type is based on vinegar which cleans, and olive oil which helps keep the leather supple.
The easiest way to make that one is to get hold of a washed out spray bottle of some kind, put in half a cup of olive oil and a quarter of a cup of plain white vinegar.
Shake it really, really well before use, then spray the leather and let it sit for five minutes or so, then set about it with a damp cloth and then a dry one.
That'll remove food and not ruin the leather.

It's just on the edge of being too simple. It's a better thing to have the leather really clean and then rub in a protective mixture that will let it be cleaned more easily next time.

For that we use leather conditioner cream.

It needs something like lanolin (which smells, it great for leather, but it smells) or coconut or shea butter.
That gets heated up with almond or olive (almond is better, it doesn't go tacky the way olive does, I find) and grated beeswax.
If you have castor oil, then it really makes the leather shine when it's buffed up. Good for restoration sort of thing, and the cream is good on the wood of the furniture too.

Four parts oil to the butter and the beeswax for this one.

8 tablespoonsful of oil
2 tablespoonsful of grated beeswax
2 tablespoonsful of coconut or shea butter or lanolin

I add a few drops of orange oil to mine just before it looks like it's going to set. You can use any scent Dad likes though; sandalwood is nice, I think vanilla is a bit cloying, bergamot is lovely, cedarwood is rich somehow

This lot makes a neat wee jar full. Just rub it on with a soft cloth and work it into the leather.

You can make the cream softer by adding a little more oil, or firmer by adding more beeswax (there are a lot of waxes available, carnuba for instance, but that's a hard shiny crisp wax, and so far I've only really posted simples for skin or leather, canuba isn't good for those, resin sometimes is, but hmmm, boots and bags)