A Thousand Damask Roses

In pre-industrial society, common herbs and flowers were frequently used for their medicinal and culinary properties.  The rose, with its intoxicating fragrance and edible petals, leaves, and fruit, was used in food and scent preparations as well as in decorative display.  In previous posts I've discussed rosewater and cooking with roses.  Rose Recipes, a 1939 English publication by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde collects early English and French instructions for using roses in a multitude of ways.  The recipes for rosewater, dating to the 16th and 17th centuries, are quite complex and detailed, and are distinguished by specific uses such as scenting laundry, perfume, and cooking.  

For instance, "To Make a Sweet Water of the Best Kind," a recipe included from Sir Hugh Plat's Delightes for Ladies (1594) calls for a thousand damask roses to be mixed with lavender, mace, cloves, and running water (i.e. fresh, not still water) in an earthen pot and kneaded every day for four days.  As one of Queen Elizabeth's courtier's, Plat would likely have sourced this impressive amount of fresh roses from a large, local estate.  As most of the other ingredients in this and other comparable recipes are given by weight, this recipe stands out for the sheer volume required.  Rohde's own recipe is much simpler, requiring that the petals (preferably red so as to achieve a pink hue and deep fragrance) be gently heated in soft water and then strained.

A recipe for "odoriferous candles" from The Charitable Physician by Philbert Guibert Phisytian Regent in Paris (1639) ambitiously claims to act "against venome and the plague."  One wonders about the success rate of this candle, made with red roses, cloves, storax (sweetgum resin), lebdanum (a resin), benjamin, frankinscence, staechados (French lavender), citron, yellow sanders (probably satinwood), juniper, musk, and ambergreese (amber gris, a wax-like subabtce derived from the sea).

Some of the very sage advice on cooking with roses presented in this volume includes collecting roses a few hours after dawn when the dew has dried, and removing the yellow base of petals, which imparts a bitter flavor.  Sugar is copiously used in recipes to balance the rose's natural astringency. To achieve the most concentrated rose flavor, Rohde recommends drying the petals first.  This can be done over mesh screens or in sand, as was the preference in the Elizabethan era.

Like Plat's thousand-blooms rosewater recipe, the culinary recipes in this volume reflect an elite pantry.   A lovely recipe for Rose Drops uses liberal amounts of both sugar and lemon juice, both dear commodities in the 18th centuries.  If you make these candies, however, you'll see that they were well worth the expense.  

Rose Drops from a recipe from The Complete Housewife (1736).

Recipe

This recipe requires dried rose petals, ground to a powder.  A coffee grinder works well.  To a 1/2 oz. of rose powder, use 1/2 lb. granulated or superfine sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons.  This yield requires about 3 cups fresh rose petals.  Choose a dark crimson variety.  Dry completely in a single layer over a mesh screen (about 2 days).

To Make Rose-Drops 

From The Complete Housewife (1736), published in Rose Recipes (1936)

The roses and sugar must be beat separately into a very fine powder, and both sifted; To a pound of sugar an ounce of red roses, they must be mixed together, and then wet with as much juice of Lemon as will make it into a stiff paste; set it on a slow fire in a silver porringer, and stir it well; and when it is scalding hot quite through take it off and drop in small portions on a paper; set them near the fire, the next day they will come off.

See also:

Cooking with Roses

Rosewater: Essence of the Garden

Rose Sandwiches

Banana Economics, or How to Peel a Banana

As commercial printing became more affordable and widespread in the late 19th century, food companies in the United States increasingly published promotional material designed to educate the consumer about new foods, production and preparation methods, and brands.  With commodities such as milk and fruit, these booklets were often published by a central source that represented a number of smaller companies, thereby linking up regional distribution centers and presenting a uniform image of the product that could be disseminated across the country.  Such booklets assumed limited knowledge on the part of the consumer and provided basic information such as how to determine a fruit's ripeness, as well as scientific attestations to health benefits.

Booklets were typically authored by women affiliated with the company's home economics department.  In the vein of ladies' domestic manuals of the 19th century, these booklets transmitted ideas about the science of nutrition (presented as a male domain) to an assumed female consumer charged with preparing family meals.  A Study of the Banana: Its Everyday Use and Food Value (1942, 5th ed.) is one such example, produced by the Home Economics Department of the Fruit Dispatch Company, Distributors of United Fruit Company.  Although no single author's name is given, a first edition copy of the same title is credited to Ina S. Lindman, who was director of United Fruit Company's home economics department until the 1950s.

It can be interesting to contrast the information presented in such booklets with current renderings of the same food item.  For instance, if one compares the nutritional facts stated in the booklet with the current data listed on the USDA's and the Chiquita Banana website, it appears that today's vitamin and mineral levels are significantly lower.  Perhaps the data are computed differently today, but if the numbers published in 1942 are correct, then for every 100g of raw banana, there has been a decrease in iron (about half), magnesium (4 mg), phosphorous (4 mg), and potassium (15 mg).  Oddly the booklet lists 42.0 mg of sodium, which is grossly out of proportion with today's 1.0 mg, suggesting a misprint.  I wonder if the other editions show the same figure.

In branding a Latin American food crop under one North American corporate entity, United Fruit Company exerted an imperialist influence with political, environmental, and social repercussions.  Through material such as booklets, food corporations tacitly reinforced a distinction between those who produce and those who consume.  Here, it is clear that the booklet speaks to white American consumers of all ages, as illustrated in the photographs below.
  

This 1942 edition is illustrated with a jolly though rather generic anthropomorphic banana.  Two years later the United Fruit Company adopted the feminized Chiquita banana logo, based on the entertainer, Carmen Miranda, further commodifying indigenous culture and entrenching notions of exoticism.

Further Reading:

Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. University of California Press.

Goldstein, Carolyn. 2012. Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America. University of North Carolina Press.

Kirchner Collection Blog

Book Review: Hsa*ba

Burmese food blends the pungent sweet-sour flavors of Chinese Southeast Asian cuisine with the robust aromatics of the Indian subcontinent. While there are a handful of Burmese cookbooks on the market, one need look no further than hsa*ba (2008), written by Tin Cho Chaw, a Rangoon native currently living in the UK.  The author translates the Burmese greeting, "hsa ba" as "please eat," and with this sentiment, the reader is invited to partake in 100 family recipes including street snacks and festival dishes.

Hsa*ba feels like a very personal collection of recipes and is interspersed with brief essays on specific places and dishes. The book opens with savory snacks such as pea crackers--delicate fried wafers dotted with yellow split peas-- naan bread, and Myanmar's signature laphet thote, or pickled tea leaf salad, and follows with chapters devoted to ingredients as well as many noodle and rice dishes.  A chapter on condiments provides some essential Burmese meal accompaniments, garnishes, and dips including sour chilli dip, spicy bean curd and peanut sauce, and pickled vegeatbles.  While maintaining the integrity of the dish, hsa*ba adapts dishes for which the main ingredient is impossible to find outside of Myanmar.  A recipe for shauk dhi thote, ordinarily made with shauk thi, a native citrus, is thus reworked as lemon relish, or thambayo dhi thote.

Every dish I've prepared from this book has turned out just as described; the instructions are clear and thorough.  My favorite recipe in hsa*ba is for ohn nyot khaut swe, coconut noodle soup, reminiscent of Malay/Indonesian laksa, a spicy coconut curry broth served with noodles and eggs, for which I had never found a good recipe.  As I don't eat meat I replaced the chicken in this recipe with firm tofu and used my favorite vegetable stock as a soup base.  Even with these adjustments the dish was as complex and rich as some of the best laksa I've ever eaten.