Rosehips, uses.

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.herbs
Subject: Rosehips? What are they?
From: rkjb.cix.compulink.co.uk (Ken Brown)
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 23:50:00 +0000

Micah wrote:
> Feeling an onslaught of a cold I bought some Vitamin C and have been taking 1 gram a day (ie 1,000 mg). The bottle I have says that it has RoseHips added. What are these and their benifits?

Rose hips are the fruit of the rose - yep the same one you grow for flowers. Well some of them - there are over 100 wild species of rose & probably thousands of garden varieties. Almost all of them produce edible fruit. They are anything from 2 or 3 mm across to 2 or 3 cm, usually bright red & quite hard. In this country they ripen very late and are often on the bush after Christmas.

Their benefits are that they taste nice, and in previous times they were available at a time when other fresh fruit was rare. And roses are such wonderful things anyway it seems a pity not to use the fruit!

Well, the pulp or juice pressed out of them after cooking tastes nice. The whole fruit is too fibrous for most people & also very acid.

Rose hips were used to make all the usual jams, jellies, preserves & so on in the past. They have gone heavily out of fashion this century though. In England it is traditional to eat rose hip syrup with rice pudding. *yech* English sweet rice pudding is enough to make anything go out of fashion.

Rose hips are rich in vitamin C - in fact they may be about the strongest source of vitamin C of any natural food. But as you are getting the stuff from the chemical companies presumably you don't need to know that :-)