Every winter the same recipes come back: honey with ginger, garlic cloves steeping in a jar, the morning spoon of olive oil and lemon. Some earn their reputation, others rest on nothing. Here is what each one really does, and how to make it without ruining the honey.
Ginger, lemon and honey
This is the most useful of the three. Honey soothes the throat, ginger warms and bites a little, lemon brings on saliva and makes the whole thing drinkable when nothing else goes down.
Grate a thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, squeeze half a lemon, add a teaspoon of honey to warm water. Not boiling: above forty degrees the enzymes in honey break down and you are drinking flavoured sugar water.
You can prepare a jar in advance: grated ginger covered with honey, kept in the fridge. It holds for several weeks and you simply spoon some out. Thyme Honey (190 dh) stands up well to ginger, Orange Honey (90 dh) goes down better with children.
Garlic in honey
Whole peeled cloves, submerged in honey, in a closed jar at room temperature. After a few weeks the garlic softens, loses its bite and the honey takes on a surprising taste, somewhere between sweet and savoury.
In the kitchen it is excellent: on roast chicken, in a dressing, with an aged cheese. On the health side, garlic does contain allicin, whose antibacterial activity shows up in the laboratory. That does not make the jar an antibiotic, and nobody has shown it shortens an infection.
One precaution few people know: garlic kept without oxygen can, in rare cases, favour botulism. Honey is very low in moisture and quite acidic, which limits the risk sharply, but keep the jar clean, the garlic well covered, and throw it out at the least doubt, above all if bubbles appear.
Olive oil, lemon and honey
This one circulates as a morning remedy. There is nothing to expect from it health-wise: olive oil is a good fat, lemon a source of vitamin C, honey a sugar, and putting them together creates no particular synergy.
As a dressing, though, the combination is excellent. Three parts oil, one of lemon, half a spoon of honey, salt: the honey balances the acidity and holds the emulsion together.
Honey and cinnamon, and its limits
The pair enjoys a reputation well beyond what it deserves. Cinnamon adds flavour, it does not burn fat.
One point is worth knowing: cassia cinnamon, the one most widely sold, contains coumarin, which can strain the liver at repeated high doses. European authorities suggest staying under roughly 0.1 mg per kilo of body weight per day, which works out at about a level teaspoon for an adult. For daily use, Ceylon cinnamon holds far less.
And for all these mixtures, the same rule: none before twelve months. Eucalyptus Honey (100 dh) or any other, honey stays off limits for a baby.