This supplies the place of the Diascordium.
The dose of this electuary is from a scruple to a drachm.
CONSERVES AND PRESERVES.
Every Apothecary’s shop was formerly so full of these preparations, that it might have passed for a confectioner’s warehouse. They possess very few medicinal properties, and may rather be classed among sweetmeats than medicines. They are sometimes, however, of use, for reducing into boluses or pills some of the more ponderous powders, as the preparations of iron, mercury, and tin.
Conserves are compositions of fresh vegetables and sugar, beaten together into an uniform mass. In making these preparations, the leaves of vegetables must be freed from their stalks, the flowers from their cups, and the yellow part of orange-peel taken off with a rasp. They are then to be pounded in a marble mortar, with a wooden pestle, into a smooth mass; after which, thrice their weight of fine sugar is commonly added by degrees, and the beating continued till they are uniformly mixed; but the conserve will be better if only twice its weight of sugar be added.
Those who prepare large quantities of conserve generally reduce the vegetables to a pulp by the means of a mill, and afterwards beat them up with the sugar.
Conserve of Red Roses.
Take a pound of red rose buds, cleared of their heels; beat them well in a mortar, and, adding by degrees two pounds of double-refined sugar, in powder, make a conserve.
After the same manner are prepared the conserves of orange-peel, rosemary flowers, sea-wormwood, of the leaves of wood-sorrel, &c.
The conserve of roses is one of the most agreeable and useful preparations belonging to this class. A drachm or two of it, dissolved in warm milk, is ordered to be given as a gentle restringent in weakness of the stomach, and likewise in phthisical coughs, and spitting of blood. To have any considerable effects, however, it must be taken in larger quantities.