The Art of Cold Maceration

The Art of Cold Maceration


This is an article by Sara Greer in the 2002 Herbal Almananc by Llewellyn .

    Your best friend calls you to announce she is pregrant.  After you hang up the phone, you go to your herb cupboard and get out dried calendula flowers. You place some of the flowers into a clean canning jar, and perhaps you mash them up with a pestle or the back of a spoon. Then you reach for your bottle of extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil and pour enough over the flowers to cover them completely, plus another inch for ligniappe. You put the lid on the jar, label it with the date and contents, and tuck it away on a closet shelf where it will stand in cool darkness until needed.

Eight months later, a few days before the baby is due,  you get down the jar of now golden oil. You lay cotton muslin over a strainer, set it over a fresh jar, and pour the maceration into it. The oil passes freely through the cloth, leaving behind any particulars. You press the flowers gently but firmly, squeezing out as much oil as you can. Eventually, when the drip of oil into the new jar has slowed and no more oil can be squeezede out, you take your harvest into the kitchen. There you divide the oil, bottling a part of it, placing the rest into a glass saucepan. You grate beeswax into the pan as it warms gently on the stove. Perhaps you add a few drops of essential oil of lavender, or a tincture of balsam poplar buds, or some angelica flower essence.  When the wax has melted, you add several drops of tincture of benzoin as a preservative and pour the fresh salve into small jars. It will cool into a soft soothing substance to smooth on mother and baby's skin. The oil, too, will mosturize skin and heal minor ailments for both recipients. You add decorative labels to the jars and bottles, pack them into a pretty basket and present it to your friend after the birth. She is delighted with your gift.

  Many natural processes take place gradually, over a more or less long period of time. The gestation of a child is one; cold maceration of herbs in oil is another. Crusaders in medieval times would fill a flask with olive oil and St. John's wort flowers when they took to the road, knowing that they would have a potent red oil by the time they arrived in the Holy Land.... 

Modern herbalists, following a slightly different road, can use cold maceration to prepare weeks or months in advance for the ailments and injuries of daily life - anticipate the colds and flues of winter with warming oil rubs beun in May, prepare for June's sunburns with violet vinegar you've been steeping since February.

  Or say you decide to make a healing oil with some fresh St. John's Wort from your garden. You put it to macerate in olive oil and go about your summer business. After four weeks your maceration has taken on the ruby hue of a successful fresh St. John's wort oil. As this oil is for your dog, who has developed a tendency to get infected ulcerations on her back, you want this batch to be really strong. Just filter out the herbs from oil, put a fresh batch of herbs into a clean jar, add the oil, label it, and tuck it back onto its shelf for another monthy or two. In time you'll have a jar of oil that you could use as a stop light, and your dog will be feeling just from sniffing it.

(To be continued)