Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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INFUSION OF ROSES (COMPOUND
Put 3 drachms of the dried red-rose leaves into 1 pint of boiling water, then add 11½ fluid drachms of diluted sulphuric acid. Macerate for 2 hours, and strain the liquor; lastly, add 6 drachms of sugar. Therapeutical effects: Astringent, refrigerant, and antiseptic. Used as a drink in fevers; also a vehicle for sulphate of magnesia, quinine, etc. Dose: 1/2 to 2 ounces.
This is not a cordial but a pharmacopoeial preparation — the Infusum Rosae Compositum of the nineteenth-century dispensatories — and it turns on a measured quantity of diluted sulphuric acid. It cannot be made in a domestic kitchen.
- The acid is the whole problem"Diluted sulphuric acid" was a defined pharmacy article, roughly a ten per cent solution prepared and assayed by a dispensing chemist. Sulphuric acid available today is a laboratory or drain-cleaning reagent whose strength varies and is often far higher; diluting concentrated acid with water generates violent heat. There is no household equivalent and no safe way to approximate it.
- The dose is a drug doseThe instruction "1/2 to 2 ounces" is not a serving suggestion; it is a prescribed dose of an acid preparation, and the whole pint was never intended to be drunk. Any error in the strength of the acid changes a mouthful of astringent liquid into a caustic one.
- What the units meantAn apothecaries' drachm is 60 grains, about 3.9 g; a fluid drachm is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.6 ml. So the formula is roughly 12 g of dried petals and 23 g of sugar to a pint. The printed "11½ fluid drachms" of acid works out to some 41 ml, but the standard dispensatory formula calls for 1½ fluid drachms (about 5 ml), so this figure may well be a misprint — and either way the quantity means nothing unless the acid is of certified strength.
- "Red-rose leaves"Leaves here means petals, specifically those of Rosa gallica, dried and sold as a drug. They were chosen for tannin and colour, not flavour; the acid was there to extract both and to keep the infusion from going brown.
- The stated effects are period medicineAstringent, refrigerant and antiseptic are the therapeutic categories of the period rather than modern pharmacological findings. The preparation's real role was as a vehicle — a palatable acid liquid in which bitter salts like quinine sulphate and magnesium sulphate would dissolve and be swallowed.
- If you want rose in a drinkA modern rose petal infusion or rose syrup, made with food-grade petals and no acid beyond a little lemon juice or citric acid, gives the colour and scent without any of this. For anything medicinal, use a current preparation.
Compound infusion of roses was a fixture of the British and American pharmacopoeias through the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a general household cookbook says a good deal about how the two categories overlapped. Books of this period are often said to have carried a "nursery and sick-room" section reprinting dispensatory formulas so that a mistress of a house could recognise, order or in some cases prepare what the doctor called for — barley water, beef tea, gruels and mucilages alongside proper drug preparations like this one. The acid served a practical purpose: tannin and the red anthocyanin pigment of Rosa gallica petals both extract better and hold their colour in acid, which is why the resulting liquor tended to keep a pink cast rather than turning the dull brown of a plain hot-water steeping. It was valued less for any effect of its own than as a carrier, a way of making a dose of quinine or Epsom salts drinkable.