Of wreaths and rosehips

My Christmas Wreath is looking better and better as I find more stuff to poke into it.

This has been a great year for berries, with the holly looking wonderful (some years the berries disappear before Christmas, which is so frustrating) and the hedgerows full of bird fodder.

Today I added some hawthorn berries (I think) and a handful of late rosehips to my wreath for added colour. It’s been a while since I last handled a rosehip, traumatised as I still am by the past.

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I’d always felt there ought to be something you can do with rosehips, and once I acquired my life-changing copy of Richard Mabey’s Food for Free, I realised what it was.

In the Second World War, when everyone was eating their potato peel and generally exploiting resources to the max, some sadistic soul dreamed up Rose Hip Syrup. Mabey provides much detail on this, as well as the original Ministry of Food recipe.

People seem to have been obsessed with vitamin C during wartime. Why, when the UK produces so much excellent soft fruit? Don’t tell me all the blackberries were all off serving their country on the Western Front. My great aunts used to speak of pips made out of wood chips to make turnip jam look more like raspberry. Why not use raspberries? There was even extra sugar ration available for jam-making. But no, the masochistic British housewife had to go and make turnip jam and Rose Hip Syrup.

I can just remember Rose Hip Syrup, which must have continued well into the 1960s. I also remember Cod Liver Oil and Malt – a fabulous, fat, slurpy, toffee-covered spoonful with the merest hint of fishiness. Rose Hip Syrup, despite the promising colour, was a comparative let-down.

Nevertheless, with Mabey behind me, I decided to create a few bottles for my fellow mothers and their infants to enjoy.

‘The pricky seed…can be a dangerous internal irritant’ warns Mabey

And not just internal, believe me.

I did have the sense to wear rubber gloves, but the seeds somehow migrated around and above these, and my arms were a mass of agonising itchy red. A myriad minute yellow spines worked their way under my skin, making life a total misery for days.

I completed the syrup somehow, and strained and strained it, each straining producing another skim of evil yellow specks. I decanted the result, which was very pretty indeed. But I couldn’t bring myself to feed it to a child. The idea of one of those spiteful yellow filaments burrowing into some innocent little pink epiglottis...

So I threw the lot away, and haven’t touched a rosehip since.

The sacrifice and suffering of the wartime housewife is rarely emphasised. I think wreathes should be laid at the cenotaph for veteran housewives as well as servicemen. Instead of poppies, these wreathes would be made from rosehips.

Not by me, though.