The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [165]
Add diced chicken, stirring frequently till chicken appears cooked through. Sprinkle flour (about two tablespoons) lightly over chicken and stir in. Add enough orange juice to cover the chicken. Add about half a cup of chicken broth or bouillon (for four breasts). Let simmer until sauce is desired thickness, adjusting with additional orange juice or broth. Salt and pepper to taste (if you use bouillon, you won’t need much salt).
You can serve this on almost anything (rice, kasha, lentils, etc.), but I prefer it on egg noodles, topped with a lot of nice grated Romano cheese.
*Dried marjoram is perfectly all right; I just happen to be able to grow marjoram most of the year here. Quantities? I don’t know; how much do you like marjoram? I generally use half a handful of fresh marjoram per four breasts—that would equal roughly a tablespoon of the dried herb. **If you’re using the normal kind of white button mushrooms. I like all kinds of edible fungi, and normally include sliced portobello mushrooms and a few porcinis or shiitakes. If you don’t like mushrooms at all, leave ’em out.
Still, since Claire definitely appreciates the role of antibiotics in modern medicine, I rather think that she may make a serious effort to obtain some workable form of penicillin, now that she has a stable home base and (for the time being, at least) is not running around the country pursued by English soldiers and irate clansmen.
I think that some readers are misled by historical fiction, in which herbal remedies are presented as essentially being simply old-fashioned equivalents of modern drugs. Now, in a way, this is quite true; effective herbs (those containing active chemicals that can affect human or bacterial physiology) actually are drugs, and modern pharmacology has evolved from them: digitalis is derived from foxglove, diosgenins from wild yams are the basis for the steroid hormones in modern medicines from oral contraceptive to asthma medications, and plant-derived substances from oil of peppermint to ipecac are found in a great many formulations.
PENNYROYAL
“If boiled and drank, it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child and afterbirth, and stays the disposition to vomit, if taken in water and vinegar mingled together.”
Culpeper (Culpeper’s Complete Herbal)
However, the important words here are “derived from.” The fact that you can— with the assistance of a rather large research laboratory and several years’ work—eventually produce an oral contraceptive by means of processing chemicals found in wild yams does not necessarily mean that a fictional character could prevent pregnancy by eating wild yams. Au contraire.
So, while some herbal remedies did (and do) work, the overall effects of these were much less powerful and predictable than those of modern drugs. As Claire herself notes, you might use mashed garlic if you didn’t have anything better, but given the choice, one would always opt for iodine.
One has to allow for the warped purposes of the novelist, though. If it is fictionally desirable for a sick person to recover—and it usually is; it slows down a story quite a bit, if you kill all the characters—then the herbal treatments applied will generally work, even if the real-life effectiveness of such a treatment is generally not nearly so spectacular.
PENICILLIN ONLINE A WRITER’S THREAD
know I’ve frequently mentioned my interactions online in the process of writing the Outlander novels. Some readers will be familiar with this sort of faceless conversation, but others will have little idea how this fascinating process works. I thought it might be interesting to provide a brief glimpse of one such interaction, both as illustration of the process, and perhaps as a bit of insight into how this sort of “research” contributes to the writing of a book.