105-year-old breezes through corona thanks to a (delicious!) home remedy
Let doctors and virologists do whatever they want; 105-year-old Lucia DeClerck from New Jersey has her own methods for staying healthy into very old age. She tells Food and Wine about the home remedy with which she also overcame a coronavirus infection without a hint of trouble. Her secret: nine of those special raisins every day.
‘I feel great,’ she told the culinary magazine from the nursing home in Little Egg Harbor, where she lives. ‘And I’ve been very lucky.’ She never eats junk food, says the very elderly woman when asked about her secret to good health. ‘And I pray every day.’
Bottle in the fridge
But Lucia’s granddaughter and daughter-in-law think it’s down to Lucia’s home remedy. ‘There was always a bottle with a dark liquid at the back of the fridge. Something with ginger, aloe vera and apple cider vinegar, with a splash of gin,’ says her daughter-in-law. ‘She took a generous sip from it every day.’ And her granddaughter thinks the raisins Grandma eats every morning also have something to do with her ironclad resistance. ‘They’re raisins soaked in gin,’ she says. ‘Every morning she eats nine of them.’
Boerenjongens
Lucia has been in perfect health her entire life. She survived the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, has never had cancer or any other ailments and illnesses, and still has all her own teeth. How? Lucia is happy to reveal the recipe for those miracle raisins: put golden raisins in a jar and pour in gin. ‘After nine days, they’re ready to eat.’ Wait a minute, that sounds an awful lot like boerenjongens, old-fashioned raisins in genever. Who would have thought that those old-fashioned jars of boozy raisins could work so powerfully!
Lucia has now had her vaccinations and can’t wait to celebrate her 105th birthday – because the party was postponed due to corona. And of course she eats those raisins every morning; why would she stop now?
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Source: Food and Wine
