On my first few s-train rides on the Munich S8-line, I noticed two old ladies from the window when my train stopped in Daglfing. They were outside the station, by a thicket of roses that I assume grew wild, baskets in hand, hair covered with headscarves. There was a little boy with them, reaching his hands over his head for something. It took a little while to figure out that they were picking the rosehips and gathering them in their baskets.
They must be making something delicious after, I thought to myself. It's obvious! Elderly ladies are good at making delicious things. Especially when a little boy is with them—he could've possibly been bribed with the promise of something sweet if he agreed to lend a pair of helping hands for the harvest.
There were two things I knew you could make with rosehips: tea and jelly. I've had the former before (I also read a Wikipedia page afterwards, which was how I knew they were also used to make the latter, and how I knew what they looked like). I assumed that the grandmothers were making rosehip jelly. Maybe they were going to use that to fill delicious cookies and pastries and pies.
Maybe I could make rosehip jelly too, I thought. It was an impulsive thought. I have a lot of those, most of which end up not being realised. This one was one of the few that did. The very next Sunday, I went rosehip picking. There were wild roses growing near the train station in Hallbergmoos, where I lived at the time. It had turned out to be a mild, sunny mid-autumn day, despite it having rained in the morning.
I tried to spread out the areas where I picked the rosehips so as not to strip entire shrubs of their fruit. I went to the local sport park, then I walked to the station, past the supermarket and the veterinary and a few doctor's offices and the pharmacy and several shops, and along the winding country road with lots of cornfields and farms, where many wild roses grew, and consequently, rosehips.
I might've climbed a fence to pick the last of them. Was it illegal? I'm not sure. It was a relatively quiet public (I think) area in the countryside. Maybe it was illegal. But at the time there had been no one to stop me from my criminal doings—if they were indeed criminal—and at the end of the day I ended up with a container full of rosehips and pricked fingers.
Rosehips, by the way, are the accessory fruit of the rose. Pollinated roses develop into fruits if you leave them on the vine. They're kind of like berries in that sense, and they're about berry-sized too, though I wouldn't eat one as I would eat a berry. There's not much flesh in a single rosehip, and the insides are mostly fuzzy seeds. I've read that the flesh is rich in vitamin C, and the fact that they're quite sour (at least in tea they are) must mean this is true.
Anyway, once I got home I rinsed the rosehips thoroughly and sat in my kitchen looking for a recipe for rosehip jelly. In the age of the Internet, finding one was easy enough: here is the one I used to make my batch of jelly. I left the rosehips in the fridge overnight and swung by the supermarket the next morning to get everything I needed.
The following is a summary (plus a few changes) of the recipe I used. I eyeballed a lot while making this, tasting the flavour as I go to determine if I'm going in the right taste direction. I'm not fond of measuring, and I like tailoring the things I make to fit my own tastes.
Anyway to make a batch of rosehip jelly you will need:
Rosehips, a considerable amount (I gathered one tupperware full of the stuff. I think the container has a capacity of around maybe 1000 ml?)
One apple, cored
Water, enough to soak all your rosehips and make them float, but not too much
The juice of one half of a lemon
The other half of the before-mentioned lemon
Butter, just a little bit, like half a spoonful. The science behind this is that butter prevents unwanted foam (scum) from forming on the surface of your jam.
Gelling sugar. This is called Gelierzucker in Germany. You can also substitute this with pure pectin while following the instructions on the package. Anyway I used an entire bag of Gelierzucker, which is about 500 grams. It's the 2:1 sugar, which means you're supposed to have 2 parts fruit and 1 part sugar. I might've blatantly ignored this ratio when making the jelly.
A bit of honey (feel free to omit)
A few tablespoons of sugar (add or omit according to how much of a sweet tooth you have)
Here's what I did:
Rinse the rosehips and sliced off the scraggly ends and the stems as well.
Cut the cored apple into cubes and one half of a lemon into slices.
Add the water, rosehips, apple, and lemon slices into a large stainless steel pot (the recipe says not to use cast iron or aluminium) and bring to a boil.
Reduce the heat and let simmer until everything is soft and mashable.
Mash the sh*t out of everything until it becomes a soupy mush.
If you have a jelly bag, use that to strain the mush. If you're like me and you don't have one, use a very fine mesh strainer, or 4 layers of cheesecloth. I used both, to yield a finer juice.
Squeeze to get all the juices out. This is the most painstaking part. Your wrists might hurt. I know mine did, like hell.
Boil the juice in a pot. The original recipe says you need 3 cups of juice, and you can add water to dilute it if you have too little. I had a little more than 3 cups, but I used it all anyway, without diluting anything.
Add gelling sugar and lemon juice. Stir nicely and let the sugar dissolve. Once it has, add butter. I impulsively added a few tablespoons of sugar and a bit of honey here, because I tasted a little bit and felt like it needed a little more sweetness.
Bring the mixture into a hard boil. Boil for another minute before removing the pot from the heat and scooping the jelly into clean jam jars.
It's a lot of work, but the batch I made yielded 4 (differently sized) jars, and the result was, despite my eyeballing, delicious. It lasts a long time if you pop it in the fridge (I finished mine in four months, and it still tasted fine by then). I spread it on toast, mixed it into my yogurt, ate cookies with it, and every time I felt like a peasant girl living in the woods, a forager who makes her own cheese and jelly. That's one of my favourite daydreams.
Anyway, when autumn comes back this year and the roses turn into rosehips, you can bet your ass that I'm making more of that sweet, sweet rosehip jelly.
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