Plants and their European monographs
- Rosehip — Rosa canina L., hip
No European Medicines Agency monograph.
From “Before You Begin”
The book’s safety page, quoted as it stands. Read the whole page — it is free.
- Fifteen of the recipes are drunk whenever you like. Make them at whatever frequency suits you, within the limits each chapter gives.
- Pregnancy. The two that carry no restriction are the rosehip brew of Chapter 26 and the sea buckthorn of Chapter 28, both of them fruits eaten as food across Europe.
Free The full recipe is in the free sample. Read it below ↓
The recipe
Rosehips are among the richest plant sources of vitamin C: fresh hips hold roughly 400 to 2000 mg per 100 g, against about 53 mg in the same weight of lemon — seven to nearly forty times as much, depending on species and ripeness.
Rosehip recipes are usually built on the claim that vitamin C “breaks down above 70°C / 160°F.” There is no such threshold: vitamin C degrades faster the hotter the water, the longer the heating and the more air it meets, and it is well under way long before 70°C / 160°F. In a Turkish study from 2017 the best result for rosehip tea came from brewing at 84–86°C / 183–187°F for 6–8 minutes, and 100 ml of that tea held about 3 mg of vitamin C1 — a small fraction of what the fruit contains.
An overnight thermos is the familiar domestic method, and what it is good for is the flavor: hard dried hips have time to give up everything they have without ever boiling. How much vitamin C survives eight hours in a thermos nobody has measured, so this chapter will not promise it.
Ingredients
- 2 tbsp dried rosehips (Rosa canina L.)
- 500 ml water (~80°C / 175°F)
- 1 tsp honey (optional)
Preparation
- Thoroughly rinse dried rosehips with cold water
- Crush the berries with a rolling pin or in a mortar
- Place prepared rosehips in a thermos
- Pour in water at 80°C / 175°F
- Steep for 6–8 hours
- Strain thoroughly through a fine sieve: rosehips contain fine irritant hairs around the seeds, and the point of the sieve is to keep them out of the cup
- Add honey if desired, to the cooled drink
Ingredient Properties
1. Rosehips (Rosa canina)
- Vitamin C — 400 to 2000 mg per 100 g in the fresh fruit, one of the highest plant concentrations known. Only a small share reaches the cup: some is lost in the drying, some in the brewing, and how much depends on temperature, time and exposure to air
- Carotenoids and flavonoids — responsible for the color and for the antioxidant activity measured in the laboratory
- Tart and fruity — the flavor rosehip syrups are made for
2. Honey
- Sweetener — added to the cooled drink
When to Drink It
- As a tart fruit infusion through autumn and winter
How Much
- 1–2 cups daily
Contraindications
- Gastritis with excess stomach acid, and gastric ulcer disease
- Kidney stones — a traditional caution
- Thrombophlebitis and tendency to thrombosis — a traditional caution
- Children — no separate age limit is stated, and that is a decision: the rosehip is a food fruit, and there is no monograph that would set one
- Pregnancy and lactation — no restriction is stated here, and that is a decision rather than an omission: rosehips are eaten as a food across Europe and there is no basis for treating a rosehip infusion as something to avoid. As with any herb taken deliberately and daily, mention it to whoever is looking after your pregnancy
- Do not give to children under 12 months if sweetened with honey: honey in any form, heated included, is deadly to an infant — the spores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum survive boiling, germinate in the infant’s gut and there produce botulinum toxin
- Known allergy to any ingredient