[Sca-cooks] Orange Flower Water

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> I was just thinking: maybe people with distilling technology might  
> concentrate more on getting their perfume essences and such from  
> plants with aromatic blossoms which don't produce an edible fruit,  
> versus one which does... this might help explain the comparative  
> dearth of orange-flower-water recipes compared to those with rose water.

Well, roses produce an edible fruit :) and we know they distilled those 
by the cartload (literally).
The biggest difficulty I would see is that one needs such a LOT of any 
given flower to do distillation. So, for instance, German, French and 
English distillers and cooks would be unlikely to have access to enough 
orange-flowers to distill them, while in Spain one certainly might have 
access to enough of same.

We do know that many 16th century texts that covered distillation gave 
instructions for distilling waters from whatever flower one chooses. 
Unfortunately I don't know enough Spanish to be reading the Spanish 
distillation manuals or the Italian to confirm that they were making 
orange-flower water; I have to go by other people's translations. 

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"I thought you might need rescuing . . . We have a bunch of professors 
wandering around who need students." -- Dan Guernsey