Natural Rose Water

Now, imagine walking past an Arabian garden, cool and green in the bright sun, with a fountain splashing softly in the background and a faintly sweet, almost undetectable fragrance of roses lingering in the air.

That’s rose water, too. Now, don’t you feel better about cooking with the stuff?

In fact, rose water has a long and illustrious culinary history. Made by distilling rose petals with steam, it was created by chemists of the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. It became firmly ensconced in the cooking of the Middle East, North Africa and North India, all cuisines in which the floral and the aromatic are highly prized.

But don’t think of it as an exotic ingredient used in far corners of the world. Before 1841, when vanilla became widely available (after a 12-year-old slave figured out how to hand-pollinate the vanilla orchid so that it could be commercially produced outside its native Mexico, but that’s another story), rose water was also a primary flavoring in a wide range of desserts and pastries in Europe and even the United States.It’s not hard to figure out why. This relatively inexpensive product allows

you, with just a drop or two, to add the alluring fragrance of one of the world’s great flowers to your cooking.

In one respect, though, rose water does resemble the cologne that detractors so often compare it to: too much can have the opposite of the intended effect.