Love's Labor's Lost V, ii
He recommended that students crown themselves with the plant to sharpen their thinking, or clear their throats with its juice before prolonged speaking. The ancients also strewed floors, rubbed tables, and stuffed pillows with mints-even adding the pungent odor to baths.
Gerard commented that "the smelle rejoiceth the heart of man, for which cause they used to strew it in chambers and places of recreation, pleasure and repose." He added that, "The smell of mint doth stir up the minde and the taste to a greedy desire of meate." If consumed with that "meate," mint might prevent indigestion, sweeten the breath and whiten the teeth! Culpeper asserted that the plant also stirred up other greedy desires, namely "venery or bodily lust."
Although there are scads of mints-as many, one writer insisted, "as there are sparks in Vulcan's furnace"-the most popular remain peppermint (mentha piperita) and spearmint (mentha viridis). The mints are named after Menthe. A mythological nymph and daughter of the river god Cocyte, she loved Pluto. His jealous wife, Persephone, A.K.A. Prosperine, supposedly turned the pretty young thing into a lowly plant to be trodden underfoot. Unable to reverse his spouse's spell, Pluto tried to atone by at least granting his ex-lover a pleasant odor!
An old superstition cautions that mint must never be gathered with an iron tool. The herb was often carried for protection by travelers or those performing exorcisms-and sometimes placed with money to make it grow! Another old wives' tale holds that an injured man must not be fed mint, or he will never mend.
The flavorful plant has been popular for a long time. It appears in Ebers Papyrus, the oldest known medical "book." Christ condemned the hypocritical Pharisees for assiduously paying tithes "of mint and anise and cummin," while they ignored other laws less to their liking. The Romans carried spearmint, also known as Roman mint, with them to Britain. The more pungent peppermint, A.K.A. brandy mint, is believed to be a later spearmint hybrid. The Pilgrims conveyed both plants to America.
Playing near summer streams as children, my siblings and I would often scent the unseasonal Christmas-y odor of candy canes, and eagerly trace the smell to its source. As Gerard put it, mints "being once set. . .continue long and remaine sure and fast in the ground." So we could never tell whether the plants we stumbled across were wild mint (mentha arvensis) or a domesticated variety planted years before near a long-gone springhouse. Perhaps a housewife had used the herbs, as the ancients did, to prevent milk from souring.
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