Rose

A flower used as a flavour across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, where it belongs in savoury dishes and sweets alike rather than reading as perfume.

Where it comes from

Culinary rose comes chiefly from Rosa damascena, grown for distillation in Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria and Morocco. The flowers are picked before dawn, when the oil content is highest, and steam-distilled — rose water is the aqueous fraction, and rose oil, or attar, is the tiny amount of oil that separates from it.

The line between food and perfume was not drawn in the cuisines that use it. Rose runs through Persian, Mughal, Levantine and Maghrebi cooking, in rice, in meat dishes, in drinks and in confectionery, and the Western reading of it as soapy is a matter of unfamiliarity and of overuse.

Varieties

• Rose water — The distillate. Varies enormously in strength between brands.
• Rose oil / attar — Extraordinarily concentrated; used by the drop.
• Dried rose petals and buds — Scattered over rice and sweets, and ground into blends like ras el hanout and advieh.
• Rose syrup — Sweetened, and the base of drinks like rooh afza and of Indian sweets.
• Rose hips — The fruit rather than the flower. High in vitamin C, used for syrup and soup in Scandinavia.
• Gulkand — Indian preserve of rose petals crushed with sugar and left in the sun.

In the kitchen

Rose water strength varies by a factor of several between producers, so a recipe quantity is a starting point and it should be added a little at a time and tasted. Too much is the reason rose gets its soapy reputation.

Its aroma is volatile and largely lost to heat, so it goes in at the end or into something already cooled.

It works with dairy, with almonds and pistachios, with cardamom and saffron, and with lamb — and it fights with almost anything strongly herbal.

Rose is tagged on 43 dishes from 32 countries in the atlas. These notes are written from general knowledge and carry no per-fact citation — see About.