Recipe(s) of the Week: Tackling Stinky Pits

With summer drawing to a close as I write this post, these recipes might be a little less immediately relevant. Still, it can’t hurt to bookmark it (the equivalent of what premodern writers did when jotting recipes down on the flyleaves of manuscripts?) for next season!

This week’s Recipe of the Week is actually four mini-recipes in a trench coat, and constitutes an entire chapter in a book which has a long and complex history: Kitāb al-Raḥma fī l-ṭibb wa-l-ḥikma, ‘The Book of Mercy on Medicine and Wisdom’ by Egyptian polymath Ǧalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505), which he reworked based on a book of the same title by a Yemeni doctor named Muḥammad al-Mahdawī b. ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣanawbarī (d. 815/1412).

As Petra Sijpesteijn writes in her open-access book chapter about the text (p. 86):

Al-Suyūṭī’s text is, however, more extensive [than al-Ṣanawbarī’s], containing 195 chapters. The book contains much more elaborate information about the use of foodstuffs for medicinal applications and offers many additional recipes and treatments for ailments, including, most notably, amulets and magical compounds, which are entirely lacking in al-Ṣanawbarī’s text. A discussion of the treatment of pregnancy and its possible complications is added as well. At the end of the book instructions on how to make amulets and the other magical materials needed for social and economic interventions are included.

Among these additional recipes are also various methods for remedying smelly armpits, among them this almost modern-seeming deodorant tablet which uses iron, a metal not commonly known for its deodorising properties:

Take, with God’s blessing, iron and mastic gum. Grind them and make them into a tablet, then fix them onto a potsherd with water until it reddens. Anoint the armpit with them and they remove its putrid smell and get rid of it with the oil ¹. True and tried.

The second recipe appears more geared towards a manual removal of any fetidness and seems safe enough to try at home:

For putridity of the armpit: If you want to remove that, take red myrrh, grind it, and knead it with good rosewater. Dip a piece of wool into it and rub the armpits with that repeatedly, and it removes the bad odour from the armpit.

Others give plain common-sense advice, presumably to be repeated as needed:

For putridity of the armpit: Take some soap and apply to the armpit. Remove repeatedly and it cuts out (or prevents) the bad smell.

The final method is reminiscent of today’s aluminium-based deodorants, but definitely falls into the toxic-do-not-attempt category:

For putridity of the armpit: Take litharge (or lead white) and knead it with rose oil. Apply to the armpit and it removes the bad smell, God willing. True and tried.

Apart from the basic advice to simply use soap, modern deodorants would probably still be the safer bet, but a bit of rose water surely can’t hurt…

1. I had trouble translating this word; tafaqqada usually means ‘to seek, investigate, check’.[↩]

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