Wheat Gruel for Young Children with weak stomachs, or for Invalids

Tie half a pint of wheat flour in thick cotton, and boil it three or four hours; then dry the lump and grate it when you use it. Prepare a gruel of it by making a thin paste, and pouring it into boiling milk and water, and flavor with salt. This is good for teething children.

Source: Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book, Catherine Beecher

A Carrot Poultice

Boil washed carrots, and pound them to a pulp with a wooden pestle; add an equal quantity of wheaten meal, and 2 table-spoonsful yeast, and wet it with beer or porter. Let it stand before the fire to ferment. The soft part to be made into a poultice with lard.

Source: The English Housekeeper, Anne Cobbett

Health Gems for Constipation

One quart unsifted wheat bran, 1 pint entire wheat flour, 1 pint milk, 6 tablespoons molasses, 2 teaspoons soda, salt. Makes two dozen gems.

Source: Cook Book, Woman’s Association of the Church of the Evangel, Congregational

To correct a bad Taste and sourness in Wine

Put in a bag the root of wild horse-radish cut in bits. Let it down in the wine, and leave it there two days; take this out, and put another, repeating the same till the wine is perfectly restored. Or fill a bag with wheat; it will have the same effect.

Source: Our Knowledge Box, ed. G. Blackie

Toilet or Face Powder

Take a quarter of a pound of wheat starch pounded fine; sift it through a fine sieve, or a piece of lace; add to it eight drops of oil of rose, oil of lemon thirty drops, oil of bergamot fifteen drops. Rub thoroughly together.

The French throw this powder into alcohol, shaking it, letting it settle, then pouring off the alcohol and drying the powder. In that case, the perfume is added lastly.

Source: The White House Cookbook, F.L. Gillette

Leanness

Leanness is caused generally by lack of power in the digestive organs to digest and assimilate the fat-producing elements of food. First restore digestion, take plenty of sleep, drink all the water the stomach will bear in the morning on rising, take moderate exercise in the open air, eat oatmeal, cracked wheat, graham mush, baked sweet apples, roasted and broiled beef, cultivate jolly people, and bathe daily.

Source: The White House Cookbook, F.L. Gillette

Chapped Hands

Take common starch and grind it with a knife until it is reduced to the smoothest powder. Take a tin box and fill it with starch thus prepared, so as to have it continually at hand for use. Then every time the hands are taken from the suds, or dish-water, rinse them thoroughly in clean water, wipe them, and while they are yet damp, rub a pinch of the starch thoroughly over them, covering the whole surface. We know many persons formerly afflicted with hands that would chap until the blood oozed from many minute crevices, completely freed from the trouble by the use of this simple remedy.

To rub the hands thoroughly, when damp, with wheat bran will have the same effect as the starch. It is also an excellent remedy for tetter on the hands — will stop the itching at once and effect a speedy cure.

Source: 76: A Cook Book

Chafing, Common Flour good to stop

“Burn common wheat flour until brown. Tie in rag and dust chafed parts.”

Source: Mother’s Remedies: Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remidies from Mothers of the United States and Canada, T. J. Ritter