Vinegar of roses is made by simply infusing dried rose-petals in the best distilled vinegar, to which they communicate their perfume. It is used for cooking and for the toilet, and for headaches, when applied in the same way as common vinegar. The ancients prepared this vinegar, and also the wine and oil of roses, which are no longer used.
Honey of roses is made by beating up rose-petals with a very small portion of boiling water; the liquid, after being filtered, is boiled with honey. This is esteemed for sore throats, for ulcers in the mouth, and for anything that is benefited by the use of honey.
The fruit of the rose is said also to possess some astringent properties; the pulp of the fruit of the wild varieties, particularly of the dog rose, after being separated from the seeds and beaten up in a mortar with sugar, makes a sort of conserve, formerly known in medicine under the name of Cynorrhodon.
Children in the country sometimes eat these fruits after they have attained perfect maturity, and have been somewhat mellowed by the frost; they then lose their pungent taste, and become a little sweet. Belanger, a French writer, who traveled in Persia in 1825, found in that country a rose whose fruit was very agreeably flavored. The apple-bearing rose (R. villosa pomifera) produces the largest fruit of all, and is the best adapted for preserving; but an English writer remarks that the fruit of R. systyla and R. arvensis, although of a smaller size, bears a higher flavor than that of any other species. Rose-buds, like the fruit, are also frequently preserved in sugar, and pickled in vinegar. Tea is sometimes made of the leaves of the rose, which are also eaten readily by the domestic animals.
The ends of the young shoots of the sweet-brier, deprived of their bark and foliage, and cut into short pieces, are sometimes candied and sold by the confectioners.
The Dog Rose takes its name from the virtue which the ancients attributed to its root as a cure for hydrophobia. The heathen deities themselves, according to Pliny, revealed this marvelous property, in dream, to a mother whose son had been bitten by a dog affected with this terrible disease.
The excrescences frequently found on the branches of the Rose, and particularly on those of the wild varieties, known to druggists by the Arabic name of bédeguar, and which resemble in form a little bunch of moss, partake equally of the astringent properties of the Rose. These excrescences are caused by the puncture of a little insect, known to naturalists as the Cynips rosæ, and, occasionally, nearly the same effects are produced by other insects.