ISSUE 46, BEST OF 2021, Part 1: Eating Roses
This is issue is devoted to items I posted in other places on the net that did not get aired here, but attracted wide notice.
Eating Roses
They look voluptuous. The old pre-tea roses exhude perfume. The colors are delectable. The petals have body and a sumptuous waxy feel. So why aren’t we filling salad bowls with shredded blooms, and why did rose cookery—which was a thing in your great grandmother’s day—pass away so decisively?
When I get puzzled by a mystery, I start investigating. How broad was the rose cookery that existed and then vanished? Were too many dishes novelty items? I can understand the disappearance if the cookery elevated appearance over flavor or fragrance.
There are recipes I am not certain about . . . one’s that sound intriguing, but offer little clue about how the finished preparation would taste. Consider,
Cherry Rose Pie [Detroit Times, July 18, 1936, 9.]
Line a pie plate with rich pastry. Brush pastry with egg white to prevent soggy under-crust. Sprinkle in pastry 1 level teaspoon flour and ¼ cup sugar, mixed together. Fill crust with pitted cherries that have stood at least 1 hour, covered with sufficient sugar to sweeten well. Dust cherries with another scant tablespoon flour. Sprinkle over cherries 1 large handful of rose petals—pick the sweetest smelling in your garden (don’t crowd or crush petals in your hand). Add a top crust, rolled rather thin., with a fancy design cut on top. Bake in oven 400 F. for 10 minutes, then 350 F. for balance of time necessary.
I fear this sounds to much like an idea and not enough like a flavor-driven formation. Indeed I think a 1915 recipe for “Strawberry and Rose Pie” that follows the above flormulation, but substitutes strawberries for cherries, probably offers a superior spectacle and flavor experience. [“Strawberry and Rose Pie,” Cleveland Plain Dealer (July 1, 1915), 9] . One of the famous cheats in making “Rose Petal Jam” was to add pureed strawberries to punch up the red color. But the jam itself without such tarting up, is intensely rosy—provided you use old style aromatic roses. Most people use red damask roses. Yellow might be interesting.
Rose Petal Jam
Rose petals—cut cups with ends snipped off and cut in strips
1 cups boiling water
3 cups sugar
2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon lemon juice
[cheat]
Red food coloring, or pureed strawberries.
We tend to think of roses as being paired with sugar. Rose syrup is a simple item, particularly good on a cone of shaved ice in summer. Candied rose petals—blossoms washed in egg white, sprinkled with sugar and left to dry or dunked into simple syrup and dried—was a favorite Gilded Age confection. They were one of the popular icing adornments on fancy cakes. (Candied violet blossoms rivaled them in favor.)
There is a world of savory rose preparations that I was only made aware of when wandering into the Middle Eastern market in Cincinnati 5 years back. Rose Petal Harissa is a fiery spice mix used as a meat marinade. It is a flavor different than you are used to. If you wish to concoct your own spice mixture using rose petals, most Middle Eastern groceries stock bags of dried petals. Or you could procure them on line.
One southern used of dried rose petals is making rose tea. It is a simple enough decoction: boiling waters, dried rose petals, and a touch of honey. I’ve been offered it in Jacksonville and in Edgefield, SC. I was told it was a calmative and an anti-inflammatory. I am rarely troubled by anxiety, and I eat many anti-oxidants during the course of the day, so these were effects that I wasn’t seeking in a tisane. But the perfume of the tea was quite pleasant, and the preparers both expert plantswomen, so the tea table conversation was excellent. Served with arrowroot biscuits!
No one has ever offered me rose hip tea, made of the ripe seed bulb of the rose after the blossom expires. So I made my own, drying the ripe fruits of a Musk Cluster Noisette rose and then immersing them in near boiling water. There was a tang of sour apple, but nothing that made me want to have another cup. It is supposed to be an anti-aging remedy, but I think aging is o.k.