We have something great to celebrate in our family this week, and we will celebrate it with May bowl.
Recipe for May Bowle:
Crush a handful of sweet woodruff leaves (before flowering) into a pitcher. Pour a bottle of white wine over it - a glass pitcher will show off the beauty of this green-golden drink. Let sit it in the fridge for an hour or longer. – Enjoy!
Sweet woodruff (Galium odorata) is a woodland herb with a wonderful perfume to its leaves; the perfume stems from coumarin. Therefore people on coumadin should avoid it or drink it sparingly, coumadin being the man-made form of coumarin. By the way, sweet grass owns the same wonderful fragrance.
Sweet woodruff should only be harvested in May. It was one of the first things I planted in my garden – it likes dappled shade and a leafy soil.
In Europe, when I was little, they used sweet woodruff flavor in all kinds of candy; my favorite was fizzling soda powder (made famous in Günter Grass' novel The Tin Drum, where the protagonist Oskar Mathzerath sprinkles it onto the belly button of his love, adds some spit, and waits for the erotic results). Meanwhile, sweet woodruff is forbidden in Europe as a food additive because of suggestions it might cause cancer. Those results came from Petri dish studies, not from population studies.
Thus sweet woodruff illustrates human greed, again: Used once a year in a May bowl, it likely is harmless - more likely beneficial. Used as a flavoring everywhere all the time, it's bound to hurt. Remember, it took the White Man to turn the occasional peace calumet into a three-pack-per-day habit. As with tobacco, so with alcohol: Since my father was a drinker, I certainly don't want to entice you to imbibe May bowl more than on a rare occasion, in moderation!
Sweet woodruff also is an example how one scientific tidbit, taken out of context, is used to suppress herbal knowledge. Which is not to say I am against science - which I am not (being married to a scientist and trained in scientific medicine myself); just that scientific results should be taken with a grain of salt and some common sense.
So we will celebrate with May bowl – and might find a second occasion later this month. And then we have to wait for a full year before we can drink May bowl again.
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