Fifteenth-century Italian scholar Bartolomeo Platina (pictured here on the left) was a member of the Pope Pius II’s College of Abbreviators – a group of freelance scribes and scholars who basically acted as The Vatican’s ghost writers. Platina published a cookbook called On Honorable Pleasure and Health in 1474. You can read a loosely translated, shorter version of one of his recipes below. Might make a perfect dinner tonight. But this is by no means the earliest written record of a recipe that calls for cannabis. In the British Museum of London one can find engraved tablets from the Assyrian Empire (3000 BCE) known as the ‘medical tablets.’ They contain instructions for making various medicines. Many of these recipes call for cannabis.
Cannabis Nectar
Use a mallet to crush clods [this likely means flowers or ‘buds’] collected after a good harvest. Add cannabis to nard oil in an iron pot, crush
together over some heat and liquefy into a health drink of cannabis nectar. Carefully treat food and divide for the stomach and the head. Finally remember everything in excess may be harmful or criminal!