SC - Re: sca-cooks V1 #324

[Sue Wensel]

Aoife  writes:

><< 
> Hallo folks!
 
> I tried this on rec.food.historic, but no one had any ideas except tea and
> modern jelly for me.
 
> I have a large number of wild rose hips growing, and I'd like to harvest
> them and do something.I've been bitten by that "preserve for the winter"
> bug. Someone once lent me a source that had "A Tarte of Hyppes" in it, but I
> can't track it down now. Do any of you have any other ideas? This sounds
> like a Ras or Esko question, but other answers are good, too.>>>>

Diana replies:

>      Hummmm, the one time I tried this with the wild roses growing on the
>edge my parents land, I didn't have much luck. They had tiny hips, that were
>mostly seed. They never softened a great deal despite long boiling and
>certainly never gave up enough flesh to do anything with. The best that those
>would be useful for would be tea, or making jelly from the juice.

Instead of boiling the hips, try decocting (simmering) a teaspoon of hips in a
cup of water for 15-20 minutes. *Don't let it boil* (this seems to nasty
things when you are trying to rehydrate anything).  It does wonders with dried
rosehips.  Macerate them in a mortar and pestle.

All this was done in preparation for making rose-hip butter, which was a
greater success than even the honey butter!  I macerated the rose hips, then
added them and a drop or two of honey (and a couple drops of the juice) to the
butter.  And I was left with a wonderful tea to drink afterward.

I wonder what this would taste like with a little vinegar and oil and put over
a salad??  Maybe done as muffins -- use the rose hip tea in lieu of the water?
 Rose bread??

>      Another idea, though, might be to dry the hips and powder them in a
>spice grinder, then sneak the powder into various things. It would probably
>work well as a fruity, sour note in a number of dishes or even baked goods.
>But Vitamin C is easily destroyed by heat or exposure to air, so powder it as
>needed, and cook it as little as possible to preserve as much of the
>nutrients as you can. How about rose hip lemonaide? Mix the powder with the
>lemon juice, sugar and water and let it steep a few hours before serving. If
>you can dry the hips quickly but gently enough to preserve that red color you
>should have a pretty pink lemonaide. 
 
Sounds like a yummy idea.

> >>>It's my sneaky way of getting vitamin c to my cold-ravaged kids. It was
28
> degrees in my front yard this morning, here in the
> Northern-Poconos-meet-the-Catskills area. We've already had more than our
> share of school-transmitted colds and flu (not to mention the kid who gave
> us chicken pox). If I tell my little girls I'm making something out of
> roses, they'll go wild! Corinne might actually eat it (a miracle in itself).
> She loves foraged food, for some reason.>>>>
 
>      (Grin) In that case you might even be able to get her to drink the
>lemonaide if the color *isn't*  as nice as you might wish! On the less period
>front, you might try giving them echinacea tea or extract to boost their
>immune systems. It's not generally recomended for continual use, but in small
>amounts you can take it for several weeks at a time, take a few weeks off,
>then take it again. It's been studied a good bit, and has been shown to be
>effective. Of course, there are plenty of Vitamin C tablets out there that
>taste awfully good........... ;-)

Just be careful.  Even if all you are using are store-bought preparations,
it's wise to get a respectable herbal (almost all of mine are sitting in my
car right now).  John Lust's _The Herb Book_ is one of the best out there. 
Earl Mindell's _The Herb Bible_ is good for beginners; but I prefer Dian
Dincin Buchannan's _Herbal Medicine_, which has really, really good
instructions for herbal preparations from teas/infusions/decoctions to
tinctures to balms/salves/ointments, etc. 

Derdriu

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