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Hip Sauce, for Puddings, Etc
Take the seeds from half a pint of ripe hips. Boil them in a little water, until they are sufficiently tender to press through a coarse sieve. Mix a wine-glassful of light wine and a tablespoonful of moist sugar with the pulp, boil up once more, and serve. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, uncertain, for hips are seldom to be bought. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A hedgerow sauce that survives on two things: getting every seed and hair out of the hips, and not cooking the fruit into blandness. The rest is a matter of translating the Victorian measures.
- The hinge: seeds and hairsRose hips are lined with fine bristly hairs around the seeds that irritate the mouth and gut, which is why the recipe opens by removing the seeds. Halve the hips, scrape the cavity clean, and after sieving rub the pulp through a second time in a fine nylon sieve or muslin to catch strays. A coarse sieve alone will let hairs through.
- Half a pint of hipsThis is a volume of whole hips measured before seeding, not a weight: an imperial half-pint is about 10 fl oz by volume, perhaps 4-5 oz of hips. Expect the yield of pulp to be small.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian kitchen usage a wine-glass is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup). "Light wine" indicates an unfortified table wine rather than a fortified one; the recipe does not specify red or white.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar with the molasses still in it; light muscovado is the closest match. Rose hips are tart, and one tablespoon is on the mean side for a dessert sauce, so taste and add more.
- TimingThe half hour covers softening the hips, which is the slow part. Once the wine and sugar go in, one brief boil is all that is wanted; long cooking flattens the fruit's flavour, and vitamin C, for which hips are now valued, is degraded by prolonged heat.
- Which hips, and from whereDog rose and rugosa hips are the usual choices, picked after the first frost when they give slightly to the thumb. Take them from unsprayed hedges or gardens, not from florists' or municipal roses.
- ServingEnough for three or four, poured warm over a steamed or baked pudding. Hips contain pectin, so it may thicken somewhat on cooling; thin it with a spoonful of water if you want it pourable at room temperature.
Rose hips belong to the long English tradition of gathering food from hedgerows rather than buying it, which is exactly why Cassell's cannot price the recipe: "hips are seldom to be bought." The fruit of wild roses, particularly the dog rose, had been used for conserves, tarts and syrups for centuries, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipt books treat hip conserve as much as a tonic as a sweet. Their reputation as an unusually rich source of vitamin C came later, and it was during the Second World War that hip gathering in Britain was organised on a national scale to make rose hip syrup for children when citrus imports failed. A Victorian household compiler including a hip sauce is recording something closer to country practice than to metropolitan cookery, and the frank note about cost is a reminder how much of the period's fruit cookery still depended on what could be picked.