Mallow and marshmallow

Mallow and marshmallow: what lore surrounds it?

Folkard has the mallow served as a vegetable by the Romans and eaten in Job's day by those who “cut up Mallows by the bushes, and Juniper-roots for their meat”; it was “one of the funeral flowers of the ancients,” planted round graves, and country children call its seeds cheeses. He quotes Pliny's charm, “Whosoever shall take a spoonful of any of the Mallows shall that day be free from all the diseases that may come unto him.” The marsh mallow, Althæa, “from a Greek root meaning to cure,” was “sometimes called Bismalva, being held to be twice as good in medicinal properties as the ordinary Mallow,” and its sap went into the paste Albertus Magnus describes for those who had to hold red-hot iron in the ordeal, “and the hands covered with it were perfectly safe.” A German tradition used an ointment of its leaves “to anoint the body of anyone affected by witchcraft.”

Thiselton-Dyer notes that the “cheeses,” or fruit of the mallow, “are known in the North of England as ‘fairy-cheeses,’” that “a German antidote against the hurtful effects of any malicious influence was an ointment made of the leaves of the marsh-mallow,” and that Our Lady's bedstraw and the mallow “were supposed to have the reverse effect” to an antidote for love, inclining the heart rather than curbing it.

Grieve adds that “a dish of Marsh Mallow was one of their delicacies” among the Romans, that Syrian Fellahs, Greeks and Armenians “subsist for weeks on herbs, of which Marsh Mallow is one of the most common,” that in ancient days the mallow “was used, especially the Musk Mallow, to decorate the graves of friends,” and that the confectioner's marsh mallows “are a mixture of flour, gum, egg-albumin, etc., and contain no mallow.”