Rose Syrup
Bring a quart of water to a boil and add one pound of rose leaves. Remove from the fire, cover, and let stand overnight. In the morning strain through a jelly bag, and boil in a double boiler with four pounds of granulated sugar until syrup is clear. Cool and bottle.
A heavy petal-infused sugar syrup of the Prohibition soda-fountain type. Two things decide whether it works: the petals you use, and keeping the sugar from taking on color.
- "Rose leaves" means petalsNineteenth- and early twentieth-century usage calls the petals leaves. Actual foliage would give you a green, tannic infusion. Pull the petals free and discard the white heels at the base, which are bitter.
- A pound of petals is a great dealFresh rose petals weigh very little for their bulk, and a pound is many quarts loosely packed, which assumes a garden in full bloom. For a household batch, scale the whole recipe down: 4 ounces of petals to a cup of water and a pound of sugar keeps the recipe's proportions.
- Only unsprayed rosesFlorist roses are routinely treated with fungicides and systemic insecticides not intended for food. Use garden roses you know, or dried culinary rose petals from a spice merchant, in which case use about a quarter the weight.
- Choose fragrant varietiesThe syrup tastes of whatever the rose smells of. Old damask, gallica and rugosa types carry the flavor; most modern hybrid teas were bred for form and give almost nothing.
- The overnight standThis is an unsweetened water infusion sitting at room temperature, which is where the recipe is least careful. Cover it and let it stand in the refrigerator instead.
- Why the double boilerFour pounds of sugar to a quart of water is close to a saturated syrup and will scorch and go amber over direct heat, taking the perfume and the color with it. Gentle indirect heat only, and stop as soon as the syrup runs clear — no candy-stage boiling is wanted.
- StrainingLet the jelly bag drip rather than squeezing it. Pressed petal pulp clouds the syrup and adds a green, grassy note.
- ColorHeat turns pink petals a dull tan. A teaspoon or two of lemon juice stirred in at the end shifts the anthocyanins back toward pink and sharpens the flavor.
- Yield and useThe full quantity gives roughly two quarts of finished syrup. Bottle in clean, scalded bottles, keep refrigerated, and count on a tablespoon or two per glass of soda water, or over ice cream and rice pudding.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the brief publishing rush that followed wartime restrictions and the arrival of national Prohibition, when American households needed several hundred things to drink that were not alcoholic — hence a whole chapter of fruit and flower syrups to be cut with soda water at home. Rose syrup itself is far older than the temperance movement: sugared and honeyed rose preparations run through medieval and Persian cookery, and rose water and rose conserves were standard confectioner's stock in English and American kitchens well before 1800. What is characteristic of this period is the form — a keeping syrup in a bottle, sweet enough to be shelf-stable, designed for the siphon and the soda glass rather than the medicine chest. The very high sugar-to-water ratio is the preservative, and it is the reason a book like this could promise fountain drinks to a household with no ice machine.