(soft piano)
- Greetings every bod,
something doesn't, doesn't feel right.
Wait, I'll be back.
(soft piano)
Ah, that's, that's a lot better.
Today I'm going to finally talk about Mandrake.
Mandrake is a notorious plant
that is very often mentioned in magic and alchemy,
and yes, it is mentioned in "Harry Potter".
No, I am not going to be talking about "Harry Potter" today.
And Mandrake, although it is most popular for its root,
it does have a fruit.
This is Mandrake fruit.
And you can even see the Mandrake fruit in my T-shirt
which is a very old illustration of the Mandrake,
where you've got the root and the little fruits right there
available on my website weirdexplorer.com.
This fruit was sent to me by Siri.
Siri, thank you very much.
I've been wanting to try this one
for a very, very long time.
And I'm excited about it,
a little concerned but excited about it.
Why am I concerned?
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Yes, I am going to taste this fruit.
However, I'm gonna put this out there right now.
Do not try this yourselves.
This video is for educational purposes only.
This is something not to be taken lightly.
It has the nickname, Devil's Apple,
and it's called that for a reason.
The Mandrake plant contains a whole cocktail
of different toxic compounds.
Ones that are kind of similar
to that of the Deadly Nightshade,
which is related to Mandrake.
Most of the toxicity of the Mandrake is in its roots,
its leaves, and its seeds.
So if I were to take this fruit whole
and start munching into it with the seeds,
you know what's gonna happen?
I'm gonna get really sick.
So yeah, great care has to be taken
if you're going to be eating this thing.
And even then there isn't a whole lot of information
about consuming Mandrake fruit.
So why would I try something that is so dangerous?
Well, people do eat it.
I have found accounts of people eating this thing.
How I understand it is that this probably
does have those compounds in it,
but at a much lower concentration
than the other plant parts.
So it's not the sort of thing
where I think you can just like make a jam out of it.
If you were to do that,
especially with a dangerous aspect
of maybe getting a seed in there,
which is you definitely don't want,
it might give you more of that compound
which you don't want to be eating.
And also every plant is different.
Sometimes a plant will have more of a compound
than another plant.
And also everybody is different.
So some people might be more susceptible
to a poison than another person.
There are too many unknowns for me to say,
"Hey guys, this is edible.
Go eat it."
I don't think it is.
I think this is edible in small quantities
in this particular circumstance of me making this video,
but I wouldn't really push it.
So yeah, don't try this at home guys.
(bright music)
First though, let's talk about the incredible history
of this plant.
This has for a very long time, hundreds of years,
been tied to magical practices.
And the reason for that,
at least one of the big reasons for that
is that when you pull this out and you see the root
the root is very often forked at the bottom,
so it looks like it has little legs.
So people have seen this
as being kind of like a humanoid sort of plant.
Old anatomical illustrations of the Mandrake
exaggerate these features just a little bit.
In these illustrations,
there is both a male and a female form,
and it is believed today that those descriptions
are of two different species.
The male is typically Mandragora officinarum,
and the female is Mandragora autumnalis.
I was sent Mandragora autumnalis,
which means that it's from the female root,
if you look at the old illustrations,
which means I am trying the fruit
that is on my shirt.
I'm excited.
Now for all the gardeners out there,
if you are interested in growing the Mandrake,
according to these old texts
in order to grow the Mandrake, you need to take the blood
and the semen from a hanging man
and put that on the ground,
and that will cause the plant to grow.
Harvesting the Mandrake root is not exactly easy
because when you pull it out,
the little root person will scream,
and that scream is so loud and so blood curdling
that when you hear it you die.
So, and also when you die, you're damned to help.
It's just, it's just how it works,
but there is a way around this.
According to one account written by Philip de Thaun
in the 12th century, here's how you do it.
The man who will gather it must dig about it.
Softly and gently, so that he does not touch it.
Let him take a chained dog.
Let it be tied to it,
which is ravenous and three days fasted.
Let bread be shown it, from far let it be called.
The dog will pull it, the root will break,
and will utter a shriek.
The dog will fall dead through the shriek which it heard,
and if the man hear it on the spot he will die.
Therefore, he must stop his ears and take care
that he hear not the cry, lest he die just the same
as the dog will do if it hear its cry.
Whoever has this root, it is potent as medicine
for every sickness it can bring healing.
Except only for death, then it has no force.
That last line is important because if you pull this out
and you start dying, you can't just start eating that root.
It's not gonna work.
It doesn't cure death, it just cures everything else.
So you gotta let the dog die.
There's no way around it.
I'm sorry.
Another reason why Mandrake root
is so often tied to magic rituals
is that it contains a natural hallucinogenic and deliriant.
So when you eat it or make a potion out of it
it'll make you trip out.
In researching this I found a few instances
of people actually doing this today.
And from what I understand, it is not recommended.
They didn't have a good time, guys.
Don't do it.
- So trying to sleep on Mandrake is no fun.
The dry mouth, the restless legs,
constantly feeling like you have to piss and you can't.
And it was just miserable.
- Besides like magic spells and stuff,
it has also been used in like medicine
like actual scientific medicine
because this can be applied to rheumatism,
to help rheumatism.
It has been used also as an anesthetic for surgeries,
not anymore.
And I think that actually does have some credibility
because looking online, I've saw a blog post
of somebody who was harvesting the Mandrake
and noted that her fingers turned numb
with handling the root.
It's hard to talk about the Mandrake
without talking about witchcraft stuff.
And yeah, I'd say like half of the websites I came across
were like wickens,
and just people who use this stuff for spells
in the past and even today.
People use it a lot.
One of the interesting things I found historically
is that this was used in potions
for witches that wanted to fly.
So they'd take this potion in order to fly.
And after learning about all the hallucinogenic
and deliriant properties of it,
I wonder if you know that flight was happening up here.
They also were popular in amulets.
People would carry around a little Mandrake root with them
as a kind of protection.
This was such a popular practice
that there was a problem of people selling fake roots.
They would sell like a carved piece of wood
or a root from a different plant
and pass it off as a Mandrake root in order to cheat people.
Bootleg Mandrake roots is still a thing
because in my research
I came across several websites selling mandrake root,
and then on further inspection realized
that it was American Mandrake,
but they would list the properties of regular Mandrake.
American Mandrake is not related to actual Mandrake.
It's just another common name for Mayapples,
which I've reviewed on this channel.
If you're gonna make a spell
you don't want to use Mayapples, guys.
It's just, it's not gonna, not gonna work for you.
Okay, let's eat it.
Okay, so I have three Mandrake fruits here.
Two of them look like they're going a little bit bad,
so I'm not gonna try those ones.
This one here looks pretty good though.
And as you can see,
it's got like this long stringy bit here
where it attaches to the plant.
Just interesting 'cause it's even like,
it's in the old illustrations
where these things are kinda like popping out
of the head of the humanoid figure.
So it's kind of cool to see that.
On the end here, this appears to be
a bit of the flower.
So let's peel back those pedals.
And inside there's a little orange fruit.
And this does actually look a little bit like Belladonna,
which is one you do not want to be eating,
except those are black.
So that separates from the leaves there.
On the very tip of it, at the very bottom
there is one, two little stringy bits coming out.
I've seen it recommended
to break it apart with your fingers,
that way you don't break the seeds
because as I mentioned, those seeds are very poisonous,
so I do not want to eat those seeds.
So I'm gonna just kind of peel back the skin of it.
I'm not sure if the skin is, well, edible,
but less edible than the the flesh,
so I'm going to remove that.
And then carefully with this knife,
I'm going to pick these seeds out.
They look like tomato seeds.
Just doing this carefully.
I don't wanna like cut into it
because I don't want to break the seeds
'cause the seeds are quite small.
It'd be easy to miss one of these.
This is like preparing fugu,
but with a little berry instead.
All right, so let me.
So I think this little piece here is plenty.
I'm just gonna check it for seeds.
Yep, there's one.
So there we go.
I have a little bit of the pulp.
I've removed all the seeds from it that I could find,
and the skin as well.
And just like doing this is kind of tedious, you know?
So I can see the danger right there.
Like if this flesh is edible and those seeds aren't,
it'd be very, very easy
to accidentally get one of those seeds.
The smell of this is,
it's like Pepper Jack cheese.
All right, let's give it a try.
Doesn't taste like poison.
So the flavor of this,
well first, let's break it down.
It's not sweet.
Maybe just mildly.
It's like a 1 out of 10 on sweetness.
Not tart, it's like no tartness to it.
So 0 out of 10 on tartness.
It's maybe like slightly bitter, but not really.
Bitter the way like a bell pepper is bitter.
It doesn't exactly taste cheesy,
but it does smell cheesy.
The flavor of this is,
well, it's not bad,
but it's not good either.
It's not something I can see really going out of my way
to eat this,
especially with all like the precautions to it.
But even if this were totally fine to eat,
it's nothing to really write home about.
And the flavor of it is a little bit
like an orange bell pepper
and a little bit like a Cape gooseberry,
also known as golden berry,
also known as ground cherry, et cetera.
And if you haven't had one of those
it's a little bit, little bit like tomato,
little bit like apricot, little bit like pineapple.
This has those note.
Little bit of tomato, apricot, and pineapple note,
as well as bell pepper note.
Only without tartness and without sweetness.
So it comes up kind of flat.
Honestly not the most exciting thing to eat flavor-wise,
but one thing that is exciting about it, that history.
I mean, it's insane.
I'm really excited to have gotten a chance
to try something that is so important to history.
I mean, I have it on my shirt.
I know I keep pointing out the shirt.
This time without any sales.
Like I have this on a shirt for a reason.
It's really cool.
It's a cool plant to learn about.
Like, I do not recommend eating it,
but I do recommend learning about it.
It's, it's something that has been around for so long,
there's so much written about it.
You know, you gotta take it
with just a tiniest grain of salt,
but it's still such like a fascinating thing.
So this has been really exciting for me.
I hope you enjoyed it.
And thank you once again to Siri for sending this to me.
And I'll see you all next time.
If I start like tripping out, I'll let you know,
but I don't think it's gonna happen.
All right, bye guys.
I would like to give a big shout out
to Smarter Every Day, LoftyRex, and JMac.
They are megapatrons over on patreon.com.
Patreon, I'm sure you've heard about it.
But basically, it is how I can afford
to go on all the adventures that I go on on this channel,
and how I buy all the fruit that I buy.
So if you are interested in supporting the channel,
check out the link in the description below.
Another way to help out is by going to my website.
My website has all my videos organized into categories,
which is pretty cool.
And I also have T-shirts for sale over there.
So check it out and I will see you all next time.