May comes flowering and fragrant, her garlands herb-scented. Fill up the May bowl. Pour in the wine, pour one quart red and one quart white, then lightly spice with the forest's sweet woodruff. Tie two ounces of woodruff in a scalded piece of cheesecloth and let commune with the wine one hour and no more lest the woodruff leave a bitterness to dissipate its meadow-flower charm. Add one pint of fresh strawberries cleaned and split, sweeten to taste with orange blossom honey, and serve cold but not iced.
For sweet health's sake, herbs to the wine, sprigs of balm to the claret. Into a bowl place the thinly sliced rind of a lemon, add a small bunch of borage, a small bunch of balm. Cover with sherry; crush herbs and rind with a muddler, pour in a bottle of claret. Sweeten the bowl to your taste, cover, and allow to chill several hours. Strain before serving; add a bottle of seltzer, or champagne, the purse allowing. Pour the drink over shaved ice. A cup light and twinkling in its ways as sunshine merry-making over blue water.
For the herbs of spring visit or write to America's oldest herb pharmacy, Raubenheimer's, opened in 1874, at 1341 Fulton Street in Brooklyn; a branch shop in Manhattan at 46 Dey Street. These stores handle as many as five thousand seeds, barks, roots, and leaves. Each spring we go calling on the herb pharmacist, Dr. Otto Raubenheimer, a man full of years, yet hale and hearty.
“I'm eighty-four years old and spry as a lad,” the doctor tells us. “Nothing like smelling herbs and eating them to make a man fit. Spring fever got you? Now it's a tea you need made of sassafras bark, from the root.” The doctor contends that much of the sassafras on the market is the bark of the tree and this hasn't the same medicinal value as the bark of the root. His sassafras is gathered by an herb collector in Virginia and in early spring before the sap rises, a bark superior, at $1.50 a pound.
Dandelion, the pest of the American lawn, gives its root for spring tonic. That bitter root of queen's-delight has been used in the South as a blood purifier since the colonists of Jamestown discovered the “queen's” medicinal properties.
There is everything in the doctor's herbal collection—frankincense and myrrh, the same preparation the wise men carried for the Babe in the manger. There is the sarsaparilla for compounding root beer, the very herb, 'tis said, that cured the Emperor Charles V of his gout. This cinchona bark up from Peru was used to relieve the stubborn fever of the Dauphin of France.
Wisps of perfume rise from a thousand canisters, from sacks, jars, barrels, drawers. Herbs are here from every corner of the world.
The doctor broke off a fragrant spring of sage and offered it to us. “He who would live for ages must eat sage in May.”
But we had gone for the woodruff, selling 50 cents an ounce. Expensive? But these stocks are out of Europe and almost depleted. By another May the doctor thinks new shipments will be coming. We pay the price willingly, for “Put into wine, woodruff makes a man merry.”
No amiable brown flood of bock beer this year, but pretzels show up and in every which shape, a few remain twisters but there are pretzels in star form, pretzel sticks, thick and thin, pretzel squares, big and little, pretzels in alphabet. A new two-pound patty tin packed by Bachman's of Reading, Pennsylvania, containing five different-shaped pretzels, sells at R. H.Macy's, Broadway at 34th, for $1.49.
Prima donna of the assortment is a light-colored twister, the kind the Pennsylvania Deutsch around Lancaster munch. To the outsider, all pretzels of the Pennsylvania Dutch Country taste much the same. But let a native bite into one, or even look at it for that matter, and he can tell instantly whether it's from Lancaster, Reading, York, or Harrisburg. Bernice Steinfeldt, author of a booklet, The Amish of Lancaster County, has told us the difference in the various Pennsylvania pretzels. She says that Reading pretzels are small and thin; that Lancasterians vow nothing can compare with their thick, medium-sized pretzels, while folks from Harrisburg champion a type thick and big.
The traditionalists consider the new pretzel shapes as sacrilegious. They point out that the word “pretzel” comes from the Latin “pretium,” meaning a reward, and that the priests once gave pretzels to children for learning their prayers. That's why the pretzel was formed to represent folded arms. Glazed hard pretzels, thickly encrusted with coarse salt, were given out at monastery doors to passing pilgrims. The hole in the pretzel served the practical purpose of making it possible to string the bread on the pilgrim's staff. At another period we read that pretzels were worn like bracelets and necklaces on feast days to ward off the influence of wicked spirits.
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