
This seems to be quite a traditional recipe. The taste of this syrup is like caramelized onions, almost pleasant.Ī. I used more as needed, and today my cough and lungs are much better. A tablespoon of the syrup stopped the coughing. I had a raw cough and my lungs hurt from congestion. The sugar sucks the juice out of the onion and makes a clear syrup. When we were children, our mother made us a cough syrup by slicing an onion and covering the slices with sugar. Important warning: Don’t give raw honey to babies under a year old because of the risk of botulinum toxin. A review of six randomized controlled trials found that honey relieved children’s coughs better than placebo ( Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, April 10, 2018). I switched it up a bit and used raw local honey as the sweetener.” Nope, that’s it! I just made it for my 5-year-old son who got a bad cough at school (not COVID). I remember onion and sugar but thought there was something else in it. “My grandmother (who would have been 99 at the end of this month) used to make this for us when we were kids. Other readers have offered stories like yours, though. Sadly, we have found no clinical trials on onion syrup. There are multiple versions, some using honey, while others sweeten the onion with sugar. We have heard from a number of readers who were given onion syrup for coughs when they were kids. When that concoction cooled, it was our cough syrup.Īs for herself, at the first sign of a cold or sore throat, she would make an onion/tomato sandwich on sourdough bread and eat it.Ī. She would then strain the liquid and boil it down some more. When I was a kid, my German mother would chop up an onion and boil it in wine and honey.

Now that it is cold season, you might be interested in my favorite remedy. We haven’t conducted research on any of these, but one that keeps cropping up year after year is an onion cough remedy.

Every winter, we hear from people who’d like to share their favorite family remedies for coughs, colds and flu.
