Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rose Brandy, for Flavouring Cakes and Puddings
Rose Brandy, for Flavouring Cakes and Puddings
Fill a bottle with freshly-gathered rose-leaves, and shake them down. Pour brandy over them to cover them, cork the bottle closely, and store the infusion for use.
A flavouring infusion rather than a dish, and the only real difficulty is knowing what the Victorian writer meant by "rose-leaves".
- "Rose-leaves" means petalsIn nineteenth-century usage the petals of a flower were its leaves. Use petals only; the green foliage contributes nothing but a bitter, grassy note.
- Which rosesScent is everything, and modern florist roses are bred for shape and shipping rather than perfume. Damask, gallica, rugosa and old shrub roses give the strongest fragrance. Snip off the pale heel at the base of each petal, which is bitter.
- Unsprayed flowers onlyAnything from a florist or garden centre should be assumed to have been treated with pesticide or fungicide. Use your own garden or a grower who sells petals as food.
- ProportionsThe original measures by volume: fill a bottle or jar with petals, shaking them down to settle, then pour brandy over to cover. On a smaller scale, about a cup of petals to a cup of brandy is workable.
- Steeping and strainingA week in a cool dark place is enough for a light infusion, two to three weeks for a strong one. Strain out the spent petals then rather than storing them indefinitely, as suggested here; they eventually turn the liquid brown and slightly vegetal.
- KeepingOnce strained, the alcohol preserves it more or less indefinitely in a corked bottle away from light. Colour fades before flavour does.
- How much to useIt is considerably milder than commercial rose extract. Start at a teaspoon or two per pound cake, custard or rice pudding, tasting as you go, where a modern recipe would call for a few drops of essence.
Rose brandy belongs to the long stretch of English and American cookery before vanilla became cheap and universal, when the standard sweet flavourings were rose water, orange-flower water, lemon peel, nutmeg, mace and bitter almond. Rose water had come into European kitchens from the Arab and Persian confectionery tradition, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a household with a rose bush might well put up its own rose brandy, rose vinegar and conserve of roses. Recipe books from both New England and the American South call for rose brandy in pound cakes and boiled puddings, and the practice survived long enough to be recorded well into the nineteenth century. Its appearance in a dictionary of cookery under flavourings, alongside the essences that were by then sold ready-made, catches the moment when the household infusion was becoming optional.