SC - rose sekanjabin/was coffee and tea

[Crystal A. Isaac]

kat wrote:
>         I like sekanjabin; I've been fortunate enough to taste it at a few events.  A lady in southern Shores makes a rosewater sekanjabin I still fantasize about... but I don't even want to consider the price.

Hey baby, it's cheaper than you think.

(I'm about to refer to stores local to central Califorina, USA. Sorry to
be provinical. Documentation is at the very end.)

I adapted this recipe from Elizabeth and Cariadoc's Miscellany. Page
73-74. Check out their website for more cool ideas.

Sekanjabin
2 cups water
4 cups white sugar (or 3.5 cups clarified honey)
1 cup white wine vinegar
Herbs to taste: handful (about 20 stems' worth of leaves) mint or 2
tablespoons chopped fresh ginger

Bring the water to a boil and add sugar, stirring until dissolved.
Reduce heat, add vinegar and allow the mixture to simmer (steaming but
not bubbling) for 30 minutes. Remove from heat and add mint or ginger.
Allow the spices to remain in the mixture until cool, (perhaps an hour).
Filter out the spices when bottling. You can store sekanjabin in beer
bottles if you have a capper, or very clean two-liter plastic bottle or
mason jars. To drink, dilute about one part sekanjabin with four to ten
parts water. 

The rose variant you may have purchased at the Southern Shore raffle
used (as the herbs) rose extract, rosehips and dessicated cardamom. I
got the idea for that spice mixture from _The Arabian Nights_,
translated by Husain Haddawy, based on the text of the 14th-century
Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi (ISBN 0-679-41338-3). In one of
the stories a boy is given a sweet iced drink flavored with rosewater
and cardamom by a man who turns out to be his father. I first tried it
without the vinegar, but it was just too sweet for me. Then when I found
the oxymel of roses reference in Moses Maimonides, I tried it that way
and it's much better.

Rose extract is $2 for two ounces at Nyravanna Groceries on California
Street in Mountain View. You will use one and half teaspoons for a
regular batch of sekanjabin. Rosehips are fairly inexpensive at the Palo
Alto Whole Foods Market (or the reputable herb/health food store of your
choice) you will need about an ounce, I think it was eight-four cents
last time I looked. If you don't care about the color, you can leave the
rosehips out. They are only to mimic the color of the rose petals you
should use. (Food quality dried roses are $18 a pound and have to be
special ordered in no less than pound quantities, or they are free if
you garden organically.) Dessicated cardamon seeds are less than a
dollar an ounce at Whole Foods, or really cheap by the pound at
Nyravanna Groceries. Crack the seeds in a mortar and pestle without
making them into dust. You will want to filter out the pieces later. I
buy whatever sugar is the cheapest at the grocery store. I buy Heinz
vinegar by the gallon, because I make pickles and Arabic food. Quantity
is cheaper but white wine/red wine/apple cider vinegar is usually less
than $2 a pint.

So for  $2 extract, $1 in rosehips, $1 in caradmon seeds, $4 for five
pounds of sugar (you'll have leftovers) $2 of vinegar and free tap water
you can make a triple batch of the recipe above for ten dollars, which
will keep you and your house in sekanjabin for most of the tourney
season if you dilute to Elizabeth's recommended 10-1 ratio. Yeah, this
version is more expensive than tea. But there's no caffeine to dehydrate
you, you can drink with pride and maybe give a bottle to next year's
raffle. As a bonus, you can dilute on site to save packing room. 

According to Martin Levey (see below) sekanjabin is from the words for
vinegar and honey. You can make great sekanjabin with honey, but it is a
little more expensive. For some reason many of the translators refer to
sugar & vinegar as sekanjabin and honey & vinegar as oxymel. However,
there is no great consistency about it, as you will see below.

You will notice in the Andalusian cookbook that the sekanjabin recipe is
referred to as "sekanjabin simple" I think this means that this was a
general recipe that had other stuff added to it as health and taste
allowed. Sekanjabin may have been used as a way to make medicinal herbs
palatable, so you can replace the mint with other herbs for different
flavors. 

Some people replace the vinegar with lemon juice, but the shelf life of
a lemon sekanjabin is about two months, whereas the vinegar seems to
keep indefinitely. Lemons are expensive this time of year, but many
Westies have lemon trees with thyroid troubles and those trees are still
producing. Write back privately (crystal at pdr-is.com) if you wanna know
who to ask for lemons.

More documentation than anybody really needs:

_An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century. A Complete
Translation by Charles Perry et al_. ©1992 by Charles Perry. Reprinted
in _A Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Cookery Books_ compiled by
Friedman, David (Sir Cariadoc of the Bow) Published privately. pages
A-71 to A-78

Page A-74.
Syrup of Simple Sekanjabin (Oxymel) 
Take a ratl of strong vinegar and add it to two ratls of sugar, and cook
all this until it takes the form of a syrup. Drink an uqiya of this with
three of hot water when fasting ... make it with six uqiyas of sour
vinegar for a ratl of honey and it is admirable.

page A-73
Syrup of Mint: Way of Making It
Take mint and basil, citron and cloves, a handful of each, and cook all
this in water to cover, until its substance comes out, and add the clear
part of it to a ratl of sugar. The bag: an uqiya of flower of cloves,
cook all this until a syrup is made....

Syrup of Dried Roses
Take a ratl of dried roses, and cover with three ratls of boiling water,
for a night, and leave it until they fall apart in the water. Press it
and clarify it, take the clear part and add it to two ratls of white
sugar, and cook all this until it is in the form of a syrup. Drink an
uqiya and a half of this with three of water....

Maimonides, Moses (1135-1204 CE). _Maqalah Fi Bayan Ba'D Al-A'Rad
Wa-A;-Jawab 'Anha Ma'Amar Ha-Hakra'Ah_. Edited and translated by
Leibowitz, JO and Marcus, S. _Moses Maimonides on the Causes and
Symptoms (Maqalah Fi Bayan Ba'D Al-A'Rad Wa-A;-Jawab 'Anha Ma'Amar
Ha-Hakra'Ah [and] De Causis Accidentium)_ Published by University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA. 1974. ISBN 0-520-02224-6 LCCCN 71-187873

page 125 - 127
Galen, and those who preceded him among the physicians, mentioned a
drink which they name in their language hydromel; they used to prepare
it from honey and thin white wine, as they used to prepare oxymel from
vinegar and honey. But their successors, as they prepared oxymel from
sugar and vinegar, prepared hydromel from sugar and wine. This is a most
excellent drink, beneficial in strengthening the stomach and the
heart,...The description of its preparation is: take five Egyptian
pounds of sugar, cook it as syrups are cooked, removing its foam, until
it acquires a good consistency. Then cast into it one Egyptian pound of
good wine, and thicken it into a syrup of the consistency of syrup of
rose. This Servant has mentioned this syrup along with the foods only
because it resembles them....

page 139
...If there is thirst, drinking oxymel of roses is preferable to
drinking hydromel...drinking oxymel of currants is preferable. 

Al-Kindi, Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Isaq (ca. 800-870 CE) _The Medical
Formulary or Aqrabadhin of Al-Kindi: Translated with a Study of its
Materia Medica_. Translated by Levey, Martin. Published by The
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. 1966. LCCCN 65-12105

Page 284
>From the section on Materia Medica:
149.  sakanjubin. Oxymel....It is here made up of vinegar, sea salt,
honey and water....Sakanjubin is Arabicized from Pers. sirka-anjubin,
"vinegar and honey."
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