Rosa × damascena (the damask rose of rose water and attar) · R. gallica var. officinalis (the apothecary's rose) · R. rugosa (the East Asian rose, the Chinese meigui) · R. canina, R. rubiginosa, and their kin (the hip-bearing wild roses) · R. × centifolia (the cabbage rose of Grasse and the Dades)
Origin: Four wild homelands and one horticultural one: the damask rose arose where the ranges of its three parents met across Persia and Central Asia; <em>R. gallica</em> grows wild from southern Europe through Anatolia to the Caucasus; <em>R. rugosa</em> along the coasts of China, Korea, and Japan; and the hip-bearing dog roses across the whole of Europe and western Asia. The cabbage rose has no wild origin at all, having been assembled by Dutch breeders between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries
The rose is the hundredth ingredient in this atlas and, of all of them, the one that most stubbornly refuses to be only food. It is simultaneously a flavouring, a medicine, a perfume, and a symbol, and in most of the places that use it in the kitchen it is doing at least two of those things at once. Botanically the genus Rosa holds somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred species, the count contested because roses hybridise and set seed apomictically much as brambles do, and upon that wild foundation gardeners have raised more than thirty thousand named cultivars. Almost all of them are ornamental. The number that carry a real culinary tradition is five.
The first and most important is Rosa × damascena, the damask, which is not a wild species but an ancient hybrid: the traditional account gives it as R. gallica crossed with R. moschata, and genomic work since the two-thousands adds the Central Asian R. fedtschenkoana as a third contributor, which places its origin where those three ranges meet, across Persia and the lands to its north-east. Loosely double, some thirty petals, soft pink, and extravagantly scented, it is the rose of rose water and of attar and the source of very nearly every rose flavour in this atlas. The second is R. gallica var. officinalis, the apothecary's rose, semi-double and deep crimson-pink with a boss of golden stamens showing at the centre, and possessed of one property that decided its history: it holds its scent when dried, which made it the rose of the medieval European still-room and confectioner. The third is R. rugosa of the East Asian coasts, a single flower of five broad magenta petals above deeply wrinkled leaves, which China calls meigui and which bears the largest hips of any rose. The fourth is not one rose but a group, the dog rose R. canina and its relations, grown for nothing but those hips. And the fifth, R. × centifolia, the hundred-petalled cabbage rose whose heavy head nods under its own weight, has no wild origin whatever: it was assembled by Dutch breeders between roughly 1580 and 1710, which is why it appears in Dutch still-life painting before it appears anywhere else, and only afterwards travelled to Grasse and to Morocco.
The hip deserves a word of its own, because it is commonly miscalled. It is not a berry and not a true fruit: it is a hypanthium, the cup of the flower itself, swollen and ripened around the small dry achenes that are the actual fruits, with a mass of irritant hairs packed amongst them. The hip is therefore not something the flower produced and moved on from; it is the flower's own base, gone red. That is why this entry holds petal and hip together rather than splitting them, and it is also why the two travelled so differently: the same plant became a perfume in the south and a vitamin in the north.
What turned the rose from a garnish into an ingredient was a technology rather than a plant. Petals can be candied, pounded into sugar, and boiled into conserves, and all of that is ancient; but the concentrated, keepable, shippable forms that carry rose flavour across the world are the distilled ones, and steam distillation of the rose was refined in the Islamic world from about the ninth century, the tradition crediting the Persian physician Ibn Sina with perfecting it around the turn of the eleventh century. From the still came two quite different things: rose water, the aromatic hydrosol, cheap enough to cook with in quantity; and attar, the essential oil that floats upon it, of which a kilogramme requires something like three to four tonnes of petals and which has been amongst the most costly substances on earth ever since.
The rose travelled west out of Iran with its name attached. The Old Persian word behind it passed into Armenian, Aramaic, Arabic, and Greek, and thence into Latin as rosa, so that the word arrived in Europe along the same road as the flower. Classical Rome then took the rose further than any culture before or since, and treated it with an excess that later ages found scandalous: rose petals strewn at banquets by the cartload, rose garlands at every feast, the spring festival of the Rosalia, rose-scented wine (rosatum) made by steeping petals in must, and, if Suetonius is to be believed, guests of Nero smothered under the weight of them. That whole culture died with the empire, and the Roman rose left almost nothing on the modern Italian table; what it did leave was the plant itself, growing on through the gardens and monastery cloisters of western Europe.
The living tradition came instead from the Islamic world, and it came through the still. From the ninth century the perfumers of Baghdad and the Persian cities distilled rose water in quantity, and Fars in particular, and above all the town of Jur, exported it as far as China and the Maghreb; the Abbasid kitchen used it as freely as a modern kitchen uses vanilla, in the almond confection lauzinaj, in the milk pudding muhallabia, and in the sherbets that gave English the word julep, itself nothing but the Persian gulab, rose water, worn down by Arabic and Latin mouths. From Baghdad the practice moved west with the rest of the Arab agricultural and culinary revolution to Al-Andalus, where the Cordoban kitchen scented its cooling drinks with ma' ward, and it moved east into Persianate Central Asia and, with the Mughals, into India. It moved to Oman, whose terraced villages on the Jebel Akhdar still distil rose water in the old way each spring. And it settled permanently in the Levant, where Damascus gave the damask rose the name by which Europe knows it, and where rose water remains the defining perfume of the whole pastry tradition, of ma'amoul and qatayef and basbousa.
Europe's own rose cookery ran on a different plant and a shorter course. Rosa gallica had grown wild across the continent since before the Romans, and the returning Crusaders reinforced it: Thibaut IV of Champagne is credited by tradition with bringing the apothecary's rose home to Provins in the thirteenth century, where the town built a confectionery trade upon it that survives to this day. From France the fashion crossed to England, and for three hundred years rose water was to English cooking what vanilla would later become, flavouring the blancmanges, marchpanes, custards, and tarts of the medieval and Tudor kitchen until the American orchid displaced it in the eighteenth century. What survived the displacement in northern Europe was not the petal but the hip, gathered from the hedgerow for syrups and soups from Sweden to Scotland.
The modern map was drawn by two Ottoman decisions and one accident. The Ottoman court made rose water and rose jam central to its confectionery and gave the world lokum; and Ottoman administration carried the damask rose into Rumelia, where the sheltered valley between the Balkan and Sredna Gora ranges around Kazanlak proved so exactly suited to it that Bulgaria became, and remains, one of the two great producers of attar on earth, the other being Isparta in Turkey, planted from Kazanlak cuttings in 1888. The Mughals carried the Persian rose into India, where Kannauj still distils attar by the old deg-bhapka method and where the rose became inseparable from the sweet: gulab jamun is named for it. Dutch breeders assembled the cabbage rose and sent it to Grasse and thence to the Dades valley of Morocco, where Kelaat M'Gouna now supplies much of the world's rose water and where dried rosebuds went into ras el hanout. Indentured and enslaved people carried rose water from the Indian Ocean world to the Cape, where it flavours the Cape Malay boeber. And in the twentieth century the European sweet briar, escaped from settler gardens, naturalised across Patagonia into vast wild thickets whose hips are now gathered by the tonne as rosa mosqueta.
The rose is traded in five distinct forms and it is worth keeping them apart, because a recipe that calls for one is seldom improved by another. Fresh petals are a local and seasonal thing, used where the roses grow. Dried petals and whole dried buds are a spice, and go into Persian advieh, Moroccan ras el hanout, and the tea blends of the Levant and China. Rose water is the workhorse, an aromatic hydrosol cheap enough to pour by the spoonful, and the great bulk of the world's culinary rose passes through it. Attar, or rose otto, is the distilled essential oil, requiring something like three to four tonnes of petals for a single kilogramme and priced accordingly amongst the most expensive substances on earth; it belongs to perfumery, and a drop is occasionally used in confectionery. And the hips are a fruit in their own right, sour, seedy, and carrying many times the vitamin C of citrus by weight.
Production divides along those lines. Bulgaria's Rose Valley around Kazanlak and Turkey's Isparta between them supply most of the world's rose otto, harvested by hand before dawn in May and June because the oil content falls away with the sun. Iran, and above all Qamsar and the country around Kashan, is the great producer of rose water, distilled at the spring golabgiri and used in quantity in Iranian homes and at the shrines. Morocco's Kelaat M'Gouna in the Dades valley grows both damask and cabbage roses and holds a rose festival each May. Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh distils Indian attar by the traditional deg-bhapka method into a base of sandalwood oil. Yunnan supports a substantial edible-rose industry for the sugar and paste that fill Chinese pastries. And the hips are gathered commercially in Chile and Argentina, where the naturalised sweet briar is harvested as rosa mosqueta, and in Turkey, Russia, and the Balkans.
In the kitchen the rose remains structural rather than decorative across a broad band of the world running from Morocco to Bengal, and it is worth insisting on the point, because in the West it has drifted towards the ornamental. In Persian cooking it is one of the fixed aromatics, in the ice cream, the rice pudding, the sherbet, and the spice blend. In Indian sweets it is definitional: gulab jamun carries it in its name, and gulkand, the sun-macerated petal preserve, is eaten by the spoonful as a cooling tonic and folded into paan. In Turkey it is lokum and gül reçeli; in the Levant it is the syrup over every pastry; in Yunnan it is the filling of the fresh flower cake. Northward the hip takes over, in the Swedish nyponsoppa eaten with almond biscuits, the Russian shipovnik infusion kept in every household against the winter, and the British rosehip syrup that a wartime foraging campaign made a fixture of the medicine cupboard. Two forms of one flower, at opposite ends of a continent, doing entirely different work.
Historical Journey of Rose
The Hedgerows & Woodland Margins of Europe and Western Asia — c. 6000 BCE
Across the whole of Europe and western Asia, on woodland edges, in hedgerows, and on any rough ground that will hold an arching cane, grow the wild hip-bearing roses: the dog rose Rosa canina above all, with the sweet briar R. rubiginosa, the downy rose R. villosa, and a tangle of related forms that botanists have never fully agreed upon. Their flowers are single and modest, five pale petals about a boss of stamens, gone within a day and of no use to a perfumer. What they are gathered for is the hip, and the hip is a curious thing: not a berry and not a true fruit at all, but a hypanthium, the cup of the flower itself swollen and ripened scarlet around the small dry achenes within, which are packed amongst a mass of fine irritant hairs. The hips ripen after the first frosts, when the cold breaks down their flesh and sweetens them, and they carry many times the vitamin C of an orange by weight, a fact that northern Europe understood long before the vitamin was named. For most of history they were a wild food of the poor, of the forager, and of the herbalist, gathered from the lane rather than grown, and they went into syrups, soups, purées, and winter infusions. It is from this immense wild population, and not from any garden, that the hip traditions of Sweden, Russia, Britain, and eventually of Patagonia are all drawn.
The Aegean, the Balkans & Anatolia — c. 4000 BCE
Rosa gallica, the French rose in name only, is a plant of the eastern and southern European wild, growing from the Iberian mountains across the Balkans and through Anatolia to the Caucasus, and it is the oldest cultivated rose in the West. Its flower is semi-double, deep crimson-pink, and flat-faced, opening wide to show a full boss of golden stamens, and it has one property that no other rose of the region shares to the same degree: it holds its scent when dried. That single quality decided its history, for a rose whose dried petals remain fragrant can be stored, carried, powdered, and sold, and R. gallica accordingly became the rose of the apothecary and the confectioner from antiquity onwards. The Aegean knew the rose early and well; the Minoans painted roses on the walls at Knossos, Rhodes is traditionally the island of roses and struck them on its coins, and Sappho is credited with calling the rose the queen of flowers. Greece keeps a living rose kitchen still, in the rose petal spoon sweets of the islands and in the almond confections of the Cyclades and of Aegina, the amygdalota, whose ground almond paste is bound and perfumed with rose water and which are made for weddings, baptisms, and name days across the archipelago.
The Coasts of China, Korea & Japan — c. 3000 BCE
East Asia raised its own roses, quite separately from the Persian and Mediterranean stock, and the one that matters in the kitchen is Rosa rugosa. It grows wild along the sandy coasts and dunes of northern China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East, a tough, salt-tolerant, densely bristled shrub with leaves so deeply wrinkled and strongly veined that the species is named for them. Its flower is single and uncomplicated, five broad magenta-purple petals about a bright yellow boss of stamens, and intensely, almost soapily fragrant; and it bears the largest hips of any rose, squat, glossy, orange-red, and shaped like small tomatoes, which Japanese calls hamanasu, the beach pear. China named the rose méiguī, a word borrowed from a red gemstone, and grew it from early times for medicine, for scent, and for tea. What East Asia did not do was distil it: the great apparatus of rose water and attar belongs to the Islamic world, and the Chinese kitchen went a different way entirely, preserving whole petals in sugar and salt to make a thick, dark, intensely perfumed paste. That technique, developed in the south and perfected in Yunnan, is the foundation of everything the region now makes with the flower.
Kashan, Qamsar & the Iranian Plateau — c. 1000 BCE
The damask rose is the great culinary rose of the world, and it arose here. Rosa × damascena is not a wild species but an ancient hybrid, traditionally of R. gallica and the musk rose R. moschata, with genomic work adding the Central Asian R. fedtschenkoana as a third parent; those three ranges meet across Persia and the country to its north-east, and it is there that the cross must have happened. What emerged was loosely double, some thirty soft pink petals to a flower, and so extravagantly scented that Persian simply calls it gol-e Mohammadi, the Muhammadan flower, and uses the word gol, flower, to mean a rose without further explanation. Persia made two things of it that the rest of the world then borrowed. The first is golāb, rose water, distilled at the spring golabgiri in the towns around Kashan, and above all at Qamsar, where the harvest is still brought in before dawn because the oil falls away with the sun, and whose product goes to the shrines as well as to the kitchen. The second is the habit of treating rose as an everyday aromatic rather than a luxury, so that dried petals are a fixed component of the advieh spice blend, and rose water flavours the saffron rice pudding sholeh zard, the salep-and-cream ice bastani sonati, and the frozen vermicelli sorbet faloodeh that Shiraz has made for a thousand years.
Rome & the Roman Empire — c. 100 CE
No society before or since has consumed roses on the Roman scale. Petals were strewn across banqueting floors by the cartload and imported out of season from Egypt at ruinous expense; garlands were worn at every feast and hung above the table, where a rose suspended over the guests marked what was said beneath it as confidential, giving the Latin sub rosa; the spring Rosalia was kept across the empire as a festival of the dead in which graves were decked with roses; and Suetonius records, whether truthfully or not, that Nero smothered guests beneath the weight of falling petals. In the kitchen the Romans made rosatum, a rose wine produced by steeping petals in must or in finished wine and sweetening it with honey, which Apicius sets down alongside its violet counterpart, and they used rose in medicines, in oils, and in the pastry-cook's work; Pliny devotes long passages to the varieties and their virtues. Almost none of it survived the empire. Italy has no living rose cuisine, the rose wine of the classical table vanished with the culture that drank it, and what Rome actually transmitted was not a set of recipes but the plant itself, Rosa gallica carried into the gardens and courtyards of the villas and, later, into the monastery physic gardens of Gaul and Britain, where it waited some eleven hundred years for a use.
Baghdad & the Abbasid Caliphate — c. 850 CE
What made the rose an ingredient rather than an ornament was a piece of chemical apparatus, and it was perfected here. Steam distillation had been known in antiquity, but it was the perfumers and physicians of the Abbasid world who refined the alembic and turned it upon the flower at scale, the tradition crediting the Persian polymath Ibn Sina with completing the method around the turn of the eleventh century; al-Kindi's ninth-century book of perfumes already describes the process in working detail. Out of the still came two things: rose water, the aromatic hydrosol, cheap enough to cook with by the spoonful, and the attar that floats upon it, priceless. The province of Fars, and above all the town of Jur, exported Persian rose water the length of the trade routes, to the Maghreb in one direction and to China in the other, and Baghdad used it as a modern kitchen uses vanilla. The tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq is thick with it: in lauzinaj, the almond paste wrapped in the thinnest pastry and drenched in rose syrup that is the ancestor of baklava; in the milk pudding muhallabia; in the melon and pistachio dishes of the caliphal summer; and in the sweetened julāb, from the Persian golāb, that would become the apothecary's julep and, at the very end of a long line, a bourbon drink in Kentucky.
Córdoba & Al-Andalus — c. 1000 CE
The rose travelled west with the rest of the Arab agricultural and culinary revolution, and by the tenth century the gardens of Al-Andalus grew it in quantity and the still-rooms of Córdoba distilled ma' ward as a matter of course. Andalusi cookery used it much as Baghdad did, in almond confections, in the marzipans and candied fruits that Spain still makes, and above all in the cooling drinks that the Iberian summer demanded, the sherbets and limonadas scented with rose and mint and sweetened with honey that were drunk in the courtyards of Córdoba and Granada. The tradition did not survive the Reconquista intact. Rose water lingered in Spanish and Portuguese convent confectionery, in some marzipans and in the odd Christmas sweet, but Christian Spain turned decisively towards other flavourings and the rose became a curiosity rather than a staple; a modern Spanish recipe calling for a floral water means orange blossom far more often than rose. What Al-Andalus did transmit, and permanently, was its cuisine in exile: the expulsions of 1492 and after carried Andalusi cooks and their recipes across the strait into Fez, Tetouan, and the cities of Morocco, where the rose water, the sweet-savoury spicing, and the taste for dried rosebuds in a spice blend all took permanent root.
Damascus & the Levant — c. 1100 CE
Damascus gave the damask rose the name by which Europe knows it, though the flower had come to Syria from further east; the city was simply the market through which Crusaders and Italian merchants met it, and they named it for the place they bought it rather than the place it grew. The name stuck, and so did the practice. Rose water is the defining perfume of Levantine pastry, and it is used with a consistency that amounts to a regional signature: almost every sweet in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan is finished with a sugar syrup, the ater or qater, and that syrup is scented with rose water, with orange blossom, or, in the usual practice, with both together in proportions that every household argues about. It goes over ma'amoul, the moulded semolina biscuits filled with dates, walnuts, or pistachios that are made in quantity for Eid and for Easter; over qatayef, the stuffed pancakes fried or baked through Ramadan; over knafeh and basbousa; and into the drinks, above all jallab, the date and grape molasses cordial served over crushed ice with pine nuts. The Levant does not treat rose as a luxury or a flourish. It treats it as one of the two floral waters without which a sweet is not finished.
Provins, Champagne & Medieval France — c. 1240 CE
Rosa gallica had grown in France since the Roman plantings, but it was the Crusades that made it a trade. Tradition credits Thibaut IV, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, with bringing the apothecary's rose home from the Holy Land to Provins in the thirteenth century, and whether or not the story is literally true, the town built upon that rose a confectionery and pharmaceutical industry that lasted six hundred years and has never entirely stopped. Provins grew the variety by the hectare, dried its petals for the apothecaries of Europe, and made from them the conserve de roses: petals pounded with sugar to a stiff, deep-pink, sliceable paste that was sold as a sweetmeat and prescribed as a medicine in equal measure, along with rose honey, rose syrup, rose vinegar, and candied petals. The town's roses were carried across Europe and the trade was substantial enough that its regulations, guild disputes, and export figures survive in the municipal archives. This is the northern European counterpart to the Persian and Levantine tradition, and its distinguishing feature is that it works with the dried petal rather than the distillate, because R. gallica alone amongst the western roses keeps its scent as it dries.
England & the English Hedgerow — c. 1390 CE
England's rose story runs in two parts, one dead and one living. The first is the petal. From the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, rose water was to English cooking almost exactly what vanilla would later become: the default sweet perfume, used in quantity and without comment. The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 for the cooks of Richard II, is full of it, and it flavours the blancmange, the marchpane, the custards, the syllabubs, the fruit tarts, and the sugared confections of the medieval and Tudor table; a Tudor still-room kept its own rose water as a matter of course, distilled at home from the garden. The trade died with astonishing completeness in the eighteenth century, when vanilla arrived from the Americas and displaced it, and rose water survives in English cooking now only as a fossil in a few old recipes. The second part is the hip, and it belongs to the hedgerow rather than the kitchen garden. When the Second World War cut Britain off from citrus, the Ministry of Health's County Herb Committees organised the wild gathering of rosehips as national policy: schoolchildren and Women's Institute members stripped the lanes by hand and were paid by the pound, hundreds of tonnes were collected each autumn, and the National Rose Hip Syrup made from them was issued to young children. It is one of very few cases of foraging turned into nutritional policy, and it fixed the flavour in British memory for two generations.
Yunnan & Southern China — c. 1400 CE
China took the rose in a direction nobody else did. Where the Islamic world distilled it and Europe dried it, the Chinese kitchen preserved the whole fresh petal in sugar, working it with the hands and packing it down until it collapses into a thick, dark, jammy paste of extraordinary concentration, sometimes with a little salt or honey and sometimes left to mature for months. That paste, méiguī jiàng, is the foundation of Chinese rose cookery, and Yunnan, whose mild highland climate suits the flower and which now supports a substantial edible-rose industry around Kunming and Anning, is its heartland. Its most famous form is the xianhua bing or fresh flower cake, a small flaky pastry of laminated lard dough filled with rose paste that is sold hot from the ovens of Kunming and carried away by the boxful as the standard gift from a visit to the province. The same paste fills mooncakes at the mid-autumn festival, sweetens the sticky rice cakes of the south, and is stirred into hot water as a drink. Beside it stands méiguī lù jiǔ, the rose liqueur distilled in the south, which is not only drunk but is a working ingredient of Cantonese cooking, going into the marinade of char siu and into red-braised dishes, so that a great deal of southern Chinese food carries a faint rose note that most of those eating it never think to name.
Jebel Akhdar & the Omani Interior — c. 1500 CE
On the terraced slopes of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain of the Omani interior, at some two thousand metres where the nights are cold enough for the plant to set properly, the damask rose has been grown for centuries in stone-walled falaj-irrigated terraces above the villages of Al Ayn, Wadi Bani Habib, and Al Aqr. The harvest falls in late March and April and the distillation that follows is domestic and unchanged: the petals are packed into a sealed clay or metal vessel, the dahjan, set over a wood fire and buried in the ground, with a second vessel above to catch the condensate, and the resulting rose water is graded, bottled, and sold at the roadside. Omani rose water is stronger and more resinous than the Persian, and the country uses it everywhere. It goes into the coffee: kahwa, poured from the long-spouted dallah and offered to every guest within moments of arrival, is scented with cardamom and very often with rose water, and to refuse it is not done. It goes into halwa Omani, the dense, quivering, saffron-and-rose sweet cooked for hours in a copper pot and served with the coffee. And it goes into the wheat and date confections of the Gulf and the Peninsula, amongst them the pounded date and bread sweet mafrookah. The rose in Oman is not a flavouring so much as the mark of hospitality itself.
Istanbul & the Ottoman Empire — c. 1550 CE
The Ottoman palace kitchens inherited the Persian and Arab rose tradition and made it into something distinctly their own, and rather sweeter. Gül suyu, rose water, went into the enormous repertoire of court sherbets, into the milk puddings, and into the syrups; gül reçeli, rose petal jam, in which whole petals are kept intact in a clear pink syrup, became and remains a fixture of the Turkish breakfast table, eaten with clotted kaymak and bread. But the Ottoman contribution that travelled furthest is lokum. A confection of sugar and starch boiled to a translucent gel, set, cut into cubes, and rolled in icing sugar and starch, it is traditionally credited to the confectioner Hacı Bekir, who opened his shop in the Bahçekapı quarter of Istanbul in 1777 and whose descendants still trade there, and the flavour that defines it, then as now, is rose. An English traveller of the nineteenth century is said to have carried cases of it home under the name Turkish delight, and it has been eaten under that name in Britain ever since. Ottoman administration also carried the damask rose westward into the Balkan provinces of the empire, where a sheltered valley in Rumelia would shortly make Turkey and Bulgaria between them the source of nearly all the rose oil in the world.
Haarlem & Holland — c. 1600 CE
The fifth of the culinary roses has no wild homeland at all, and its origin is not a place in nature but a trade. Between roughly 1580 and 1710 the nurserymen of the Netherlands, working in the same commercial hothouse of horticultural obsession that produced the tulip mania, assembled Rosa × centifolia, the hundred-petalled or cabbage rose: a complex hybrid drawing on the damask, the gallica, the musk rose, and the dog rose, bred deliberately for the extravagant globular bloom, densely packed with a hundred petals or more, whose weight makes the head nod on its stem. It is the rose of Dutch still-life painting, which is the clearest evidence of when and where it appeared, and it was bred for the eye and the nose rather than the pot. The Dutch themselves did nothing culinary with it, and this point is a nursery rather than a kitchen. What the Netherlands did was create the plant and then export it, and its onward career was as an oil rose: carried south to Grasse in Provence, where the perfume industry took it up as the rose de Mai and where it remains a perfumery flower rather than a food, and thence across the Mediterranean into the Dades valley of Morocco, where it was planted alongside the damask and where, unlike in France, it entered the kitchen.
Agra, Delhi & the Mughal Empire — c. 1614 CE
The Mughals brought the Persian rose to India along with the Persian language, the Persian garden, and the Persian kitchen, and India took it further than Persia had. The court's own founding story of the flower is the discovery of attar: that the empress Nur Jahan, or in other tellings her mother Asmat Begum, noticed an oily film gathering on the surface of a rose water channel in the garden and had it skimmed and bottled. It is almost certainly legend, since distillation was six centuries old by then, but it is told wherever attar is made, and Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh has distilled Indian attar by the traditional deg-bhapka method into a receiving base of sandalwood oil ever since. What India made of the rose in the kitchen is inseparable from its sweets. Gulab jamun, the fried milk-solid dumpling soaked in syrup, carries the flower in its name, gulab being rose water and jamun the dark fruit it resembles. Gulkand, whole petals layered with sugar and left in the sun for weeks until they collapse into a dark, sticky, intensely fragrant preserve, is eaten by the spoonful as a cooling tonic in the hot months and folded into paan. And rose water perfumes the whole Mughlai repertoire of court confectionery, the bread pudding shahi tukda, the ground rice firni, the kulfi, and the melon and watermelon ices of the summer palace.
Sweden & the Nordic Countries — c. 1650 CE
Too far north for the damask rose to be worth distilling, Scandinavia took the other half of the plant and built a substantial tradition on the hip alone. The wild dog rose and, on the Baltic sands, the naturalised Rosa rugosa with its far larger fruit are gathered after the first frosts, when the cold has softened and sweetened them, under the same right of public access that governs the picking of berries and mushrooms. What Sweden makes of them is nyponsoppa, rosehip soup: the dried or fresh hips simmered, sieved to remove the seeds and their irritant hairs, thickened lightly with potato flour, and sweetened, then served as a smooth, tawny-pink, faintly tart soup that is eaten hot in winter and cold in summer, poured into a bowl with a spoonful of whipped cream and a scattering of flaked almonds, and accompanied by crisp almond biscuits. It is not a starter but a course in its own right, most often a pudding, and it is a fixture of school canteens, ski lodges, and the domestic larder alike, sold in cartons in every Swedish supermarket. Norway, Denmark, and Finland make close relations of it, and the same fruit is dried for winter tea across the whole region.
Kazanlak & the Bulgarian Rose Valley — c. 1680 CE
Ottoman administration carried the damask rose into its Rumelian provinces, and in the long sheltered valley that runs between the Balkan range and the Sredna Gora it found conditions so nearly perfect that the region has been called the Rose Valley ever since. The combination is particular and hard to reproduce: high humidity, sandy well-drained soil, mild winters, and cool mornings that hold the oil in the petal a little longer. Bulgarian rose oil became a major export by the eighteenth century and remains, with Turkish Isparta, one of the two great sources of rose otto on earth. The harvest is the defining event of the Bulgarian rural calendar: the flowers are picked by hand between about five and ten in the morning through late May and June, because the oil content falls sharply once the sun is up, and they must reach the still within hours; something in the region of three thousand kilogrammes of petals yields a single kilogramme of oil. The Kazanlak Rose Festival at the beginning of June, with its rose-picking ritual and its crowned queen, is a national fixture. In the kitchen the valley's own product is sladko ot rozi, the rose petal spoon sweet, whole petals preserved in a clear syrup and offered to a guest on a small dish with a glass of cold water and a coffee, in the settled Balkan rite of welcome.
The Bo-Kaap & Cape Town — c. 1690 CE
Rose water reached the southern tip of Africa in the luggage of the unfree. From 1658 the Dutch East India Company brought enslaved and exiled people to the Cape from Bengal, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Ceylon, and the Indonesian archipelago, amongst them Muslim scholars and political prisoners banished from Batavia, and the community they became, later called Cape Malay, carried with it a cuisine of the Indian Ocean Islamic world: the spicing, the sweet-savoury balance, and the floral waters. Rose water settled into it permanently and belongs above all to the religious calendar. Boeber is the drink of the fifteenth night of Ramadan and of the nights of the fast generally, a warm milk pudding thin enough to drink, with vermicelli and sago, sweetened and scented with cardamom, cinnamon, a stick of stick cinnamon, and rose water, and carried in jugs between neighbouring houses in the Bo-Kaap. The same rose water goes into koesisters, the spiced, syrup-soaked, coconut-rolled doughnuts that are made on a Sunday morning and are quite distinct from the Afrikaans koeksister, and into the milk tarts and semolina puddings of the Cape table. It is the clearest surviving thread between the kitchens of Java and Bengal and the kitchens of the southern Atlantic.
Moscow & the Russian Lands — c. 1700 CE
Russia received the rose twice over and kept both halves. The petal came from the south, through the Ottoman and Persian worlds and by way of the Caucasus, and produced varenye iz lepestkov rozy, rose petal preserve, which is made in the whole-fruit Russian manner so that the petals stay intact and suspended in a loose glassy syrup, and which is amongst the most prized of all the preserves set beside the tea glass. The hip came from the Russian hedgerow itself and is called shipovnik, from shipy, thorns. Dried hips are a fixture of the Russian household in a way that has no real western parallel: they are sold in every pharmacy and every market, kept in a paper bag through the winter, and steeped overnight in a thermos to make a tawny, sour, faintly resinous infusion that is drunk by the glass against colds and fatigue. The Soviet state promoted it deliberately as a vitamin source, planted shipovnik hedges along roads and around institutions, issued it in sanatoria, schools, and the army, and gave it a place in the official dietetics that it has never lost. Between the petal in the syrup and the hip in the thermos, the rose occupies both ends of the Russian table, the ceremonial and the medicinal.
Kelaat M'Gouna & the Dades Valley — c. 1750 CE
In the high Dades valley of the southern Atlas, where the mountains fall away towards the Sahara and the villages are strung along irrigated ribbons of green, the damask rose grows as a hedge. It is said locally to have been brought by pilgrims returning from the east, and it was planted first as a living fence between the plots and along the irrigation channels rather than as a crop in its own right; the commercial distilleries came only in the twentieth century, when French interest turned the hedges into an industry, and the cabbage rose was added to the damask from the plantations of Grasse. Kelaat M'Gouna is now the centre of it, and the whole valley is scented for a fortnight in May, when the flowers are picked at dawn by women and children, sold by the sackful at the roadside, and taken to the stills; the Moussem des Roses at the end of the harvest is the region's great festival. Moroccan cooking uses the flower in two forms and both are structural. Rose water perfumes the pastries, the milk puddings, and the kaab el ghzal, and is sprinkled over the hands of guests from a silver flask before and after a meal. And whole dried rosebuds are one of the signature components of ras el hanout, the great compound spice blend of the Moroccan souk whose name means 'head of the shop' and which the spice merchant assembles from anything up to thirty or forty ingredients; without the rosebuds it is simply another spice mixture.
Araucanía, Patagonia & the Southern Andes — c. 1950 CE
The last chapter of the rose's travels is an accident that turned into a crop. European settlers carried the sweet briar, Rosa rubiginosa, to southern Chile and Argentina in the nineteenth century as a garden plant and a hedging shrub, and in the cool, wet, temperate country of Araucanía, Los Ríos, and the Andean valleys around Bariloche it escaped, naturalised, and spread with such vigour that it is classed as an invasive weed across millions of hectares, choking pasture and roadside alike. What Patagonia then did with it is the reverse of the usual story: rather than fighting the plant, the region learned to harvest it. The hips, known throughout the southern cone as rosa mosqueta, are gathered from the wild each autumn by rural families and Mapuche communities, and the trade in them is now substantial, supplying a cold-pressed seed oil that has become a significant cosmetic export and a pulp that goes into jams, purées, syrups, and infusions. The mermelada de rosa mosqueta sold at every roadside stall and craft fair from Villarrica to Bariloche, tawny-orange, sharply tart, and eaten on bread and with cheese, is the domestic end of it. An unwanted invader has become one of the characteristic wild harvests of the Patagonian year.
