Syrop z Róż, Rose and Green Gooseberry Syrup from 1885
Reader ratingsSour juice of green gooseberries poured over rose petals for a day, pressed and boiled with sugar into a rose syrup for cold water: the syrop z róż of Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa’s Warsaw household book of 1885.
- Recipe makes
- About 400 ml syrup, enough for about 13 glasses
- Prep
- Cook
- Total
About 40 minutes of work, with the juice and petals standing for 24 hours in between. Each glass then takes a minute.
Rose and gooseberry syrup in a corked bottle and a glass of it mixed with water, with green gooseberries and rose petals.
The story behind the recipe
Syrop z róż is a Polish rose syrup with a sour backbone, made by soaking rose petals in the juice of unripe gooseberries and boiling the result with sugar. Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa’s Warsaw household book of 1885 opens the recipe with the timing that makes it work: “Roses bloom when the gooseberries are still quite green.” The two are ready in the same weeks of early summer, so the sour juice of one can draw the scent out of the other.
A syrup for water
Her method is short. Pound a garniec of green gooseberries in a wooden mortar, press out the juice through thin linen, and pour it over as many picked rose petals as it will cover. After a day, press it again, boil it with sugar, skim and clarify it, and bottle it when cool. She says what it is for, too: “instead of fruit syrup in water, or for making a pink jelly.” It is a summer drink, a spoonful of rose stirred into a glass of cold water, and the pink jelly suggests the color it took from the petals.
Read more about this recipe
Making it today
The same book’s Likier Różany takes its rose from three drops of pharmacy oil and its color from cochineal. This syrup needs neither: the flowers themselves give both. Use petals from roses grown without sprays, never florist’s roses, and the darkest, most scented ones you can find. Green gooseberries are in season in late spring and early summer, and frozen ones work. Her quantities already come to about a gram of sugar to each milliliter of juice, so we keep her proportion and only make less. How the same Warsaw kitchens made their vodka liqueurs is in How Poland Made Vodka.
Rose syrup. Roses bloom when the gooseberries are still quite green. So take a garniec of green gooseberries, pound them in a wooden mortar or grind them with a pestle in a bowl, press the juice through thin linen, and with this juice pour over as many picked rose petals as this amount of juice can wet. Let it stand like this for 24 hours, pour off, press again through linen, and for each kwarta of this juice take two and a half funty of sugar, boil them together, skim, clarify, and when cool pour into small bottles, using it instead of fruit syrup in water, or for making a pink jelly with pink gelatine.
Recipe makes: About 400 ml syrup, enough for about 13 glasses
Ingredients
For About 400 ml syrup, enough for about 13 glasses. Quantities are shown as written.
Quantities as written here, for About 400 ml syrup, enough for about 13 glasses.
Rose syrup
- Green gooseberries, fresh or frozen and thawed500 g
- Unsprayed culinary rose petals, about 2 large handfuls20 g
- White sugar, about250 g
For each glass
- Rose syrup2 metric tbsp (15 ml per tbsp)
- Cold water200 ml
Measurement notes
Ingredients as written here
- 500 g green gooseberries, fresh or frozen and thawed
- 20 g unsprayed culinary rose petals, about 2 large handfuls
- 250 g white sugar, about
- 2 tbsp rose syrup
- 200 ml cold water
Equipment
Food processor or potato masher
Fine sieve lined with muslin or a clean cloth
Glass jar or bowl with a lid, about 1 liter
Measuring jug
Small saucepan
Clean glass bottle or jar for the syrup
Tumbler
Instructions
Crush the green gooseberries in the food processor or with the potato masher until they are broken up and juicy.
Tip them into the lined sieve over a bowl and squeeze the cloth hard to press out as much juice as you can. Throw away the skins and seeds.
Put the unsprayed culinary rose petals in the glass jar or bowl and pour the gooseberry juice over them, pressing the petals down so they are all wet. Cover and leave in the fridge for 24 hours.
Pour the juice and petals into the cleaned, lined sieve and squeeze the cloth again. Throw away the petals.
Measure the juice and weigh out the same number of grams of white sugar as there are milliliters of juice.
Put the sugar and juice in the small saucepan and stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Bring it to the boil and let it bubble gently for 3 minutes, skimming off the froth.
Let it cool completely, then pour it into the clean bottle, close it and keep it in the fridge.
For each glass, stir the rose syrup into the cold water.
Nutrition
80calories per serving
- Recipe makes
- About 400 ml syrup, enough for about 13 glasses
- Servings
- 13
Roughly estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for gooseberries and granulated sugar, for one glass made with 2 tablespoons of syrup.
Recipe notes
When adjusting quantities
A small batch. The sugar follows the juice, about 1 g for each ml, as in the book. The glass ingredients are for one drink.
Notes
Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.
Measures: Warsaw cooks of the time used the “new Polish” measures introduced in 1819, in which a garniec is about 4 liters, a kwarta about 1 liter and a funt about 405 g. Period sizes varied, so treat these as rough guides. Her two and a half funty of sugar to a kwarta of juice is about 1 kg to 1 liter, the proportion we keep.
Changes from the source: ours is a small batch, from about 500 g of gooseberries where she used a garniec, roughly 4 liters of fruit. A food processor or masher stands in for her wooden mortar and a cloth-lined sieve for her linen. The petals stand in the fridge rather than at room temperature. She clarifies the syrup after skimming but doesn’t say how, so we only skim it.
No gooseberries: the syrup needs a sour juice to carry the rose. In their place, use 100 ml of fresh lemon juice with 150 ml of water. That is our substitute, not hers.
Storage
Keep the syrup in a clean, closed bottle in the fridge, or freeze it. Throw it out if it turns moldy or starts to ferment.
Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.
Sources and attribution
Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa, Jedyne praktyczne przepisy konfitur, różnych marynat, wędlin, wódek, likierów, win owocowych, miodów oraz ciast, 11th ed. (Warsaw: the author, 1885), No. 19, “Syrop z róż”, pp. 132–133; our translation
Recipe details
- Drink
- Alcohol-free
- Drink family
- Shrubs, Syrups & Cordials
- Region
- Polish
- Era
- 19th century
- Source decade
- 1880s
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Season
- Summer