My Kentish great-grandmother used “Jack-in-the-’edge” as she called it (garlic mustard) to make an all-purpose salve for her large family (Nell Frizzell, 24 May). The minced leaves were put in a dish with pork fat and cooked gently overnight in the kitchen range’s slow oven. This produced a fragrant ointment thought to have antiseptic properties.
Vivien Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Barbara Stewart-Knox’s assertion that meat producers are “the most greedy industry on the planet” (Letters, 23 May) misses some far stronger candidates for greediness. Private equity, for example, takes far higher profits, and manages to pay less tax, than most meat producers; and others in the financial sector come close in their pursuit of high pay and bonuses.
William Wallace
Liberal Democrat, House of Lords
• That anyone can be “accused” of writing outside their own experience is ludicrous (American Dirt author Jeanine Cummins: ‘I didn’t need to justify my right to write that book, 25 May). Just imagine, if Shakespeare had been so constrained, the world would never have known Othello.
Joan Lewis
St Etienne de Gourgas, France
• What’s the difference between a sentence and a cat? Well, one has pauses at the end of its clauses while the other has clawses at the end of its pawses (Letters, 29 May).
Jaki Brien
Neston, Cheshire
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