By Heidi Noroozy
One
winter many years ago, I took a job at a Benedictine monastery atop a windswept
mountain in Vermont. Deep into this frozen season, I battled a cold that
wouldn’t quit and one afternoon dragged myself into the monastery kitchen in
search of a hot drink to soothe my raw throat. There, I encountered one of the
monks, who took in the sorry sight of my red nose and bleary eyes. On hearing
me croak out a miserable “hello,” he offered this bit of medical advice: “Put
garlic in your socks.”
I
opted for a hot lemonade with honey, an old family remedy. To this day, I don’t
know if the monk was serious or only pulling my leg with his
garlic-in-the-socks remedy, but I never waste an opportunity to pass on his
advice. It’s usually good for lightening the mood when the other person is
feeling like death warmed over.
Although
no one in my family ever used garlic to cure a cold, an illness had to be
pretty serious before we would resort to drugs. With the exception of aspirin,
over-the-counter-medicine was a rare sight in my childhood home. We had hot
lemonade with honey for sore throats and mint tea for stomachaches.
We
were not the only ones to rely on traditional remedies. The small Vermont town
where I grew up was populated with rugged farm folk who swore that the only way
to survive the near-tropical summer heat was to swig copious amounts of a vile
home-made brew called switchel. This concoction consisted of cider vinegar
diluted with water and rendered almost, but not quite, palatable with maple
syrup.
Later,
when I got married, my new Iranian family had their own medicine chest (or
pantry, if you will), full of home remedies. I learned entirely new
“prescriptions,” like yogurt and honey for insomnia or nabat
(saffron-flavored rock candy) dissolved in hot water (or tea) with a splash of arak-e
nana (distilled essence of mint) for nausea.
One
of my mother-in-law’s favorite remedies is a tiny yellowish brown seed called khak-e
shir. She uses it to cure two birds with one stone, so to speak. Steeped in
cold water, khak-e shir will treat a bout of diarrhea. Brew it in hot
water and it’s a cure for constipation.
Over
time, I discovered that my Iranian family and friends take the whole idea of
food as medicine a giant step beyond anything I could have imagined. In Persian
tradition, all foods are assigned to one of two categories: sardi (cold)
and garmi (hot). This has nothing to do with temperature, but refers to
the type of energy contained in the food. The idea is that a proper balance
between “heating” and “cooling” foods is necessary for good health.
To
complicate matters, according to this Persian philosophy, people also have
these same energies, with some of us being more sardi and others more garmi.
So if you’re a person with an abundance of warm energy, eating a lot of garmi
foods could make you sick, or at least give you serious discomfort, such as a
stomachache or heartburn. (Think of that huge chocolate fudge sundae [garmi]
that made you just a bit nauseous.) Seasons can aggravate the situation, which
means that eating too much garmi food in warm weather or too much sardi
food when it’s cold and damp can make you feel unwell.
This
philosophy goes back thousands of years to Zoroastrian times in ancient Persia,
although some historians say it is based on ancient Greek medical texts.
Traditional Chinese medicine, with its yin and yang, and India’s Ayurvedic
practices have similar beliefs, so who knows where the idea originated.
Whether
garmi/sardi began in Greece, China, India, or Persia, the 10th-century
Persian physician Abu Ali Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) was one of the
first to compile a complete list of “cold” and “hot” foods. Avicenna wrote over
100 medical treatises, including his most famous compendium, the Canon of
Medicine, and Iranians revere him as the “father of modern medicine.”
While
I struggle to remember which foods are heating and which are cooling, my
mother-in-law can rattle them off as easily as one of her favorite recipes.
What helps is to remember that garmi foods are on the sweet end of the
taste spectrum (peaches, cream, chicken, and eggplant), while sardi
foods tend toward sour and bitter tastes and are also harder to digest
(vinegar, beef, beans, kale, and hard cheeses).
All
of which makes me reconsider my take on switchel. Since vinegar is cooling and
Vermont summers can be sweltering, maybe there is some truth in the old-timers’
claim that their favorite summer beverage makes the heat more bearable.
As
for garlic in my socks, I’m still not sold on that one. Garlic is garmi,
but I can’t see how putting anything in my socks will keep me from sneezing.
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