Good morning. Today is quartidi, the 24th of Thermidor, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'aunée, a flower born from the tears of Helen of Troy.
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There's an ancient Latin text that mentions this flower's ability to test honey. The Apicius is basically a 5th century cookbook, and it contains several bits of advice on ingredients. In one note, the authors suggest taking honey that you may think has spoiled and immersing an inula helenium flower (also known as an elecampane) until it's completely coated. You then light the flower on fire. If the flame burns brightly, the honey is still fresh. Also interesting is that the note just before this suggests how to deal with spoiled honey: just mix it with twice as much fresh honey. This was considered contemptible food tampering by medieval scholar translators, but was probably a sincerely held belief by the Romans that good honey could cure bad honey by osmosis. After all, I'm sure the inula went up like a candle after doctoring the bad honey with good.
Elecampane is one of those herbs that has been believed to cure everything from real ailments to supernaturals ones, and is sometimes called elfwort or elfdock for this reason (it's believed to be especially effective against the magic of elves). The cultural desire for inula to be valuable somehow is hilariously belied by the modern scientific understanding that it's a pretty useless weed, good only for being invasive and hard to kill. Still, the sunshine of its flower must have attracted attention, and the mild mentholated taste of its root hinted at magic and healing.
Which is why its most famous appearance in literature is as a fairy tale balm for a terrible curse in one of my favorite folk tales of all time.
