Rose Shrub, a Springtime Treat

I have been hard-pressed to do my blog posts for the last two months.  No, work and life in general have not been the culprits; I can only point to my loquat tree in astonishment.

A loquat, in case you didn't know, is a semi-tropical fruit that happily grows in my area and I have a decent-sized tree on my property.  It has produced fruit before but this year, it outdid itself.  I have picked over 120 pounds of fruit so far and it looks like another 20 to 40 are still on it.  I have made loquat jam, loquat chutney, spiced loquats, and loquat liqueur.  I have 12 pounds cleaned and frozen, waiting for a break in my schedule.  I've given away many pounds to friends.  Loquats are lovely to eat fresh, so I've had a lot of that.

Here is a picture of my tree and a closeup of the fruit on the tree.

One heavily laden loquat tree

Luscious, heavenly, flavorful loquats

The fruit is sweet and tastes somewhat like peaches or apricots without the tartness.  But it is different from them, which makes it a treat.  The recipes are not historic and, although they are foodie fun, most of them I got off the Internet, so I didn't want to write them up for my blog.  Now you know!

But today's recipe has to do with another springtime treat:  Roses!

The wet winter and now cool, wet spring has my yard in full bloom and among the flowers are the roses I planted a few years ago.  Two are highly scented and one of those has been producing flowers regularly.  I decided I wanted to try something with the petals.

I turned to a book I used once before, when I made a Rosemary Tea Sherbert  (part 1 and part 2).  It is Flower Cookery -- The Art of Cooking with Flowers.

By Mary MacNicol, Fleet Press Corp, published 1967

Today's recipe is on page 164.

Rose Shrub

Take one and a half pounds of fresh rose petals, add three cups of water and boil up.  Remove from heat and when cool, strain.  Then add two and half pounds of sugar, and the beaten white of an egg, boil, skim, strain and bottle.


My Redaction

I picked all the rose petals I could off of the three rose bushes.  The dark red roses aren't scented but I wanted them for color.  The other two were deeply scented. 

The recipe books all say to remove the bitter white base of the rose petals.  I tasted them and found that only the red petals had a bitter base, which I tore off.  The other bases were sweet.

A beautiful basketful, picked on a rainy day

It filled my basket to the brim and yet the total weight was barely six ounces.  I needed to scale the proportions.

Rounding up to call it 6

1 1/2 pounds petals (by weight) to 3 cups of water (by volume) is the same as

24 ounces petals to 24 ounces water, so that scales down to 6 ounces of petals to 6 ounces of water.

Similarly, 2 1/2 pounds of sugar is 40 ounces (by weight), so

24 ounces petals to 40 ounces sugar gives

3 ounces petals to 5 ounces sugar.  I had 6 ounces petals so I used 10 ounces of sugar.


That is not a lot of water but the roses took up so much volume that I chose to use my enameled cast iron Dutch oven.  I put the water in the bottom and then packed the petals in on top.

A large pot filled with roses.

I liked that the lid was heavy as I wanted to keep as much of the water and rose scent in the container as possible.  I set the heat to medium high until the water boiled -- I saw steam coming out from under the lid.  Then I turned the heat down to low, which stopped the steam, but I could still hear it simmering.

After about 25 minutes, I turned the heat off and let the whole thing cool for a few hours.  At no time during the cooking and cooling process did I lift the lid.

Once it was cold, I looked inside.

Now they are cooked down.

I decided to squeeze the petals to extract all the liquid I could from them.  I scooped them into a small colander, placed that in the pan, and squeezed with my hands until no more liquid came out. 

Squished until they could offer no more.

You can see the lovely red liquid in the bottom of the pan.

Then I strained the liquid through a fine sieve into a measuring cup and saw it was almost 8 ounces.  I still decided to use the original 6 ounces of liquid quantity to determine the sugar amount because that is what the recipe seemed to indicate.

I put the liquid into a small saucepan and then I added the sugar and the entire amount of egg white, beaten.  I suppose I could have put in a lot less white but I chose not to.  I stirred it all together and put it over medium heat.

Just starting to warm up.

It started foaming almost immediately but I waited to skim it until it had come to a boil.  As it was heating I kept turning the temperature down so it wouldn't foam over.  When I saw bubbling along the edges, I used a small ladle to skim the foam off the top.

Foam!  You can see the boiling at this point, so I started skimming.

I kept skimming through the foam even though it seemed like I was taking a lot off.  Eventually I started seeing the clear syrup peeking through the foam.

Dark islands of syrup.

So I kept skimming, trying not to take the syrup off, until the surface was pretty clear.

Nearly done.

I used a wet paper towel to wipe the sides of the pan so that when I poured the syrup out, it wouldn't pick up more foam.  Then I poured the syrup through the fine mesh sieve into a clean jar.

8 Ounces of Nectar!

After it cooled, I gave it the taste test.

The Verdict

First we tasted it just as it was, straight out of the jar.  It was definitely a sweet syrup, thick, with a lovely rose flavor.  One tester is a person who does not generally like the flavor of roses.  When she tried this, she liked it.  She felt the sugar gave the taste enough body to feel like she was drinking something, instead of just getting a strong scent of roses.  She also felt the rose flavor was an actual flavor and not just perfume.

Everyone liked it although we all agreed that it was too sweet to have more than just a sip or two.

So we tried it mixed with several other liquids.

Just adding cold water was okay but I think too much water was added; the ratio should be more like equal parts rose shrub and water but for me to say that, I will need to experiment more.

I also added equal parts tonic water, which was interesting because the tonic water is bubbly and has a bitter taste.  That shifted the whole experience away from sweet, which I liked, and the bitter added an extra dimension in flavor.  One taster, who does not like bitter, did not like the tonic water mix.

I mixed some of the shrub with a white wine, a little more wine than syrup.  That was intriguing because I no longer got the definite rose flavor but it didn't taste like wine, either.  It was a perfumed, fruity sensation that I truly liked.  One tester thought it could be described as a "rose sangria".  She does not normally like wine but felt this was a mixture she could drink, and she described it as "classy."  I liked that.

We also mixed it with white wine vinegar.  When it was about 2 parts shrub to 1 part vinegar, it was too tart for a beverage but we thought it would be a good sweet-and-sour glaze on roasted meat.  At about 3 parts syrup to 1 part vinegar, it was a refreshing, sippable beverage.  Actually, this is what I think of when I think about a beverage called shrub.

Success!

I want to make more (keeping blooming, my rose bushes!) and try it with other foods.  I think it would be good in lemonade, or drizzled over fresh loquats (or strawberries), or on pancakes, or in my hot chocolate, or mixed with vanilla yogurt as a fruit salad dressing, or brushed on the top of a cake hot from the oven (white, yellow, or lemon cake).

Sohan Halwa -- A Persian sweet for a Sweet New Year!

Welcome to 2019!  This is the beginning of my EIGHTH year of blogging about historical cooking.  I am astonished that I have been able to do this and keep it going.  It has been fun, intriguing, and educational, but most of all it has been a source of pleasure to meet people who like to cook historical recipes, too.

For the record, this is my 167th post and my blog has had over 64,000 page views from people around the world.  I am honored they have read my work and hope they have benefited from it.

I decided 2019 needs to be a sweet year, so I chose a sweet recipe to help kick the year off right!

My friend M is a lovely Persian woman who is also smart, pleasant, and very kind.  Occasionally we have a chance to talk about food and its preparation, and it is fun to see what sorts of recipes she has been preparing for her family.

One day she showed me a picture of some Persian sweets she had made.  Impressive!  Beautiful!  They looked like a professional confectioner had made them.  One in particular was pink and shaped like roses.  M told me they were called "Sohan Halwa" and they were the soft kind.

I knew the word "halwa" or "halva" as a confection made from ground sesame seeds and I have tried several flavor varieties, and liked them.  But this was different:  Instead of sesame, it was made from wheat flour and there was a very specific way to treat the flour that I had never tried.

So M dictated to me the ingredients she uses and the method she follows.  I tried it once and brought her the results; I was glad I had because I had not gotten the flour cooking method right.  M was able to help me understand what I needed to change.  I tried it again and she declared it, "Just right!"

Here is the recipe she shared with me:

Sohan Halwa

200 grams white wheat flour
90 grams butter, softened
200 grams powdered sugar
4 tablespoons rose water
2 tablespoons rose powder
1 drop of food coloring

You can see the rose powder in one bag and the whole rose petals in another

Put the flour in a dry, shallow frying pan over medium heat.  Set the timer for 5 minutes and cook the flour while stirring it continuously.  The flour should change color but only to the palest ivory color.  The goal is to get the flour hot and to cook out the raw flavor, but not let it get browned at all.

Barely off-white, but very warm

Put the cooked flour in a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients.  Stir well or, if it is cool enough,  mix with your hands, until you have a uniformly mixed, soft, pink ball of dough.

This was the first correct attempt.

Press the dough into a buttered pan or individual molds.  M bought a set of rose-shaped molds and was very pleased with the result.

Put the pan or molds into the refrigerator to chill.  After it is firm, cut the slab into small pieces and serve.

My Notes

I chose unsalted butter and red food coloring.  Also, I weighed the flour, sugar, and butter before I started the cooking process.

M had given me the bag of powdered roses and the bag of whole rose petals; later I found an online source for food-grade dried roses so I could make my own powder.  It was simple to put the petals into my (never-for-coffee-beans) coffee grinder and turn them to powder.

After the dough has formed -- all the ingredients came together easily and quickly, and the butter didn't melt as much as got softer -- I used my hands to push it into the buttered pan.  After it had been pushed over most of the pan, I put a sheet of waxed paper over the top and used a glass to roll the dough to an even thickness and smooth the surface.  My fingers were just the right tool to push the dough down on the edges of the dough to help keep them uniform, too.

This is the first correct attempt.

Then I used a knife to score (not cut all the way through) lines on the surface to show the pieces.  I used a tiny appetizer fork to press a design into each piece.

Second correct attempt.  Less coloring and smaller piece size.

After that, I covered it and put it into the refrigerator to chill.  The next day (but several hours would have worked, I think), I popped it from the pan and cut it into pieces.


The Verdict

I made this correctly twice.  The first time was just as M had instructed me to do.  She tasted it and declared that it was exactly what she expected.  Hooray!  I loved the strong rose flavor and the creamy texture and the sweetness.

Success!  It was good!  The only part that I would change is cutting it into smaller pieces.  It is rich enough that a small piece would have been better.  Perhaps about 1 inch x 1 inch in size.

But there was a part that my other guest tasters (many of them) wanted to change:  the strength of the rose flavoring.  People who are not accustomed to it found it too strong.  The scent gets to your nose first and your taste buds next, and some people were put off by just the scent.  Others were willing to try it (they liked the scent) but the taste was too much.

So I tried it again, and this time I used 2 tablespoons rose water and 2 tablespoons water.  This gave me the same result for texture but a lighter rose scent, which people liked much better.  One guest taster said she could taste the sweet and the butter more that way.

My advice to you is to know your audience.  If they already like the rose flavoring, as I do, then use the full strength.  If not, back it off a little or a lot to help them appreciate it before they even take a bite.

My thanks goes to the lovely M for sharing this recipe and for giving me the dried roses.

And I wish you all a Happy New Year!