Carolin Schratt
Recipes from the natural pharmacy
Culinary
Relaxation
25.09.2015
When was the last time you went to the pharmacy? When our stomach hurts, our skin burns or our head throbs, that's usually the first place we go. As if out of pity, the pharmacist puts a sample pack of sweets or free tissues in the medicine bag - and as we walk out with the healing remedy in our hands, we already feel a little bit healthier.
Herbal knowledge from the Walsertal
And when was the last time you went for a walk in nature? For Lydia Fritz, her pharmacy is “nature da dussa”. She knows exactly which ingredients she can find where within a radius of 15 kilometers. 15 kilometers! That's like a Cologne resident knowing every currywurst stand from Leverkusen to Bonn...
Today, the Walser herb witch not only takes us into her natural pharmacy in the Schwarzwassertal, but we also make some remedies ourselves in her herb workshop. As soon as Lydia has greeted us, she runs to the meadow behind her little house in Wäldele and pulls one herb after another out of the ground. She holds each one in her hand like a precious trophy, stroking it with her fingers as she explains to us that sometimes the structure of the plants alone reveals something about their effect on humans.
Experience herbal knowledge up close
It gushes out of her for half an hour, and on the way to her herb workshop you can watch seven figures in colorful rainwear stumbling across the dry stream bed and wandering through the grass at the edge of the path. Then the bucket is full: we have all our ingredients together.
Lydia has already prepared everything for her herb apprentices in the herb workshop: Calendula oil and St. John's wort oil, kilos of salt, two hotplates with dotted cooking pots and a set of scales. There's no doubt who the seven chopping boards and mortars are for - our workplaces are set up. What happens over the next two hours actually has more to do with cooking than with laboratory experiments. At one end of the table, greens are being chopped, at the other end an alcoholic mixture is simmering on the stove and in between, four herb apprentices are crushing a mixture of herbs and salt with a pestle. As she flits back and forth between the pots and fills the first jars with the herbal balm, she passes on her endless knowledge of local herbs to us. Why some plants are better picked in the morning, which plant is the most important for women. And when we finally step out into nature with the herbal wine in our stomachs and our healing balm and herbal scrub in our hands, the natural pharmacist even seems a little proud of her protégés - and we feel a whole lot healthier.
DIY recipe - Body scrub with primal salt and nourishing oil
- Ingredients:
- 60g primordial salt
- 20g oil extract with an oil of your choice, e.g. Masterwort oil (very grounding and brings clear thoughts), marigold oil (nurturing), St. John's wort oil (calming)
if desired also with birch leaves or ivy (detoxifying), lavender and lemon balm (calming), with masterwort or rosemary (invigorating) - essential oils: three drops of grapefruit and three drops of orange, two drops each of cypress and Arabian mint or peppermint (can also be omitted)
- Preparation:
- mix the essential oil with the other oil
- stir into the salt
- pour into a small screw-top jar
- Application:
- Massage the scrub onto moistened body skin using circular movements.
- Shower off warm and gently dry the skin.
