A Cordiall Water (A Garland of Odd and Old Receipts to Assuage the Ills of Man & Beast)

A charming mixed bag of nostrums, elixirs, restoratives, and fortifiers, interspersed with autobiographical anecdotes from M.F.K. Fisher’s life in California, Provence, Mexico, and Switzerland.

This compelling miscellany of folk cures, elixirs, and traditional curatives gains in intrigue from the strange and captivating telling of M.F.K. Fisher, for whom directness and lack of ornament never meant the same as simplicity. In this collection of panaceas, superstitions, and home wisdom that she gathered from her childhood and her travels around the world, Fisher paints a fascinating and complex picture of how we think about our health—and the things that build it up and break it down. Whether she’s reporting on the benefits of tying a well-used sock around your neck to keep a cold at bay, or recounting the almost mystical healing rituals of an altercation-prone pet cat, her writing rings with the trueness of all her work: piercing, revelatory, and illuminated by her unerring sense for the resounding drama of being human.