I was talking to my mother as I weighed the sugar to add to the rose sherbet. We will be visiting her in NY in a month, so there always seems to be plenty to talk about.
“Okay,” I said, “the sugar is weighed and I can add it with the water.”
“Are you going to taste it??”
“Oh wait a second, mom, I can’t find the camera. Maybe I left it in the truck…”
I got Kaya and went out to the truck, but no camera.
“Aren’t you going to taste it now? Oh, we’ll have to serve it in tulip-shaped tea glasses.”
“Sorry, can’t do it now. I have to take pictures.”
(The camera appears to have been left behind in the garden, but I did manage to find the iPod.)
After week one, with the rose petals steeping in lemon juice, I ended up with about two cups of ruby juice, redolently rosy. I strained it into a ceramic pot and added half a kilo of sugar. Then it sat for another week.
It was a bit warm here, so I put the liquid in the fridge once in a while. Probably nothing would have happened if I hadn’t, though.
So now it was time to add yet more sugar:
A liter of water also went in, and after much stirring I managed to get it all to dissolve. Then, the moment my mother had been waiting for. Mixed with cold water, the sherbet became pale pink. Its flavor was sweet of course, but the lemon juice gave it a pleasant acidity. I think the proportion of syrup to water is quite important- too much syrup, and it would be too sweet.
The rose flavor literally bloomed in my mouth as I drank it. Have you ever smelled a rose and wished you could put it in your mouth so the smell could fill your head? Well, get out your glass jars and dig out the lemon squeezer; this is a way to smell your roses long after the last bloom has faded.
Garden Correspondent 
What a fantastic drink.. my red roses are just starting to come out then i will start at the beginning! Lovely description of the taste!! c
This, like your earlier post, is completely new to me and sounds wonderful. Thanks for sharing!
Hope you found your camera. Very interesting, always great to learn about another culture and how ingredients are transformed and used, thanks.
That looks so beautiful and so refreshing. I love your description of what it was like to drink!
And such a pretty color!
Thanks so much. It is always nice when things that taste good look nice too, isn’t it?
I have never made rose water but I would like to try to because this looks so pretty and refreshing and I’m sure it would taste wonderful xx
It’s worth the effort to have that smell in a bottle, if you ask me!
Great idea for a drink!
Lovely! A friend of mine lived in Turkey for a number of years and is coming for a visit this summer–I know just what to serve! (I will have to steal rose petals for another year or so.)
Rose petal theft sounds positively poetic. And since the flowers don’t do much good on the plant (from the repeat flowering perspective), you would be doing a rose grower a favor by cutting them!