Page:Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.djvu/2010

1806 The best quality is prepared at Ghazipoor, in Hindoostan. It is apt to be adulterated with sandal wood and other oils. In the spring of the year, the country about Ghazipoor is a vast garden of roses, and presents a most beautiful appearance. The flowers are gathered and steeped in stone jars filled with water. These are set out in the open air over-night, and early in the morning the essential oil is skimmed off. This is the attar, and the water is sold for "rose-water." Two hundred thousand well-grown roses are required to produce half an ounce of the attar; and this quantity, when manufactured, sells, if genuine, for about £12 at the English warehouses. It is very difficult, however, to obtain the genuine article, as even the original manufacturers adulterate it.

Fill a large earthen jar, or other vessel, with the leaves of rose-flowers picked over and freed from all dust and dirt. Pour upon them as much pure spring water as will cover them, and from sunrise to sunset, for 6 or 7 days in succession, set the vessel where it will receive the sun's rays. At the end of the third or fourth day a number of particles of a fine yellow oily matter will float on the surface, which, after a day or two, will gather into a scum. This is the attar of roses. It must be taken up as often as it appears, with a piece of cotton wool tied to a stick, and squeezed from this into a small phial, which must be kept corked and tied over.

Mode.—Put 2 quarts of best vinegar, with 2 ozs. of each of sage, rosemary, mint, rue and wormwood, into a jar, and let it stand by the side of the fire for a week; then strain it, and add ½ an oz. of spirits of wine.

Reduce to a very fine charcoal 2½ ozs. of areca nut, and pound as finely as possible another ½ oz. in its raw state, then mix with 1 oz. of finely powdered cuttlefish bone, and flavour with cloves or cassia according to taste.

Place pieces of camphor, cedar-wood, Russia leather, tobacco-leaves, bog-myrtle, or anything else strongly aromatic, in the drawers or boxes where furs or other things to be preserved from moths are kept, and they will never take harm.

Take 1 oz. each of cloves, caraway-seeds, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and Tonquin beans; add as much Florentine orris-root as will equal the other ingredients put together; grind the whole well to powder, and then put it in little bags among your clothes, etc. Almost anything aromatic will keep off moths. The common bog-myrtle, which grows so freely in swampy places, is an excellent antidote.