Bayberry

As soon as I moved to New York I started going to the local beaches.  I'm not one to sit still for very long and as soon as the SPF was applied I'd go exploring.  Walking along the beach I'd look for shells and pretty rocks, but further up along the dunes were some other treasures to behold.  Beach roses, or beach plum, were the first discovery.  Even tho they're not a showy rose they have a wonderful rich fragrance.  The rose hip, or plum as they're called in this case, are much larger than your average hip and many people make jam with them.  I also found horsetail, a very old plant that's been around since prehistoric times.  Horsetail is loaded with calcium, so much so that one has to be very careful not to take too much for fear of calcium crystals forming.  There's plenty of bittersweet, too, and in the autumn the dunes are a sea of orange.

The best thing I've discovered on the beach, tho, are the bayberry bushes.  They're so huge yet inconspicuous that they could easily be overlooked.  Northern bay, Myrica pensylvanica, has leaves with a sticky spicy aroma and the waxy berries were used by American colonists to make clean burning candles.

The herb is astringent and stimulant and emetic in large doses.  A decoction is good as a gargle for chronic inflammation and is an excellent wash for the gums.

Culinarily the leaves can be used dried as in traditional bay leaves.  In that case harvest them in the fall when they've matured and turned leathery.  Leave them to dry completely and their flavor will intensify.  I use them in soups and stews all winter long.  In season I like to chop them up fresh and use them to season pork and chicken.  I haven't had a chance to see what they do in vodka yet but I'll be trying that soon.  I hear they did wonders in a bottle of gin according to Edible Manhattan.

My special interest in making botanical colognes got me thinking of using the leaves to try my hand at making Bay Rum.  I read many recipes and bought myself a few bottles (most notably Dominca and Ogallala, the reputed best available) and set to work experimenting.  Like all of my colognes they are a work in progress and the formulas will be tweaked and improved upon until I find just the right recipe.  I made mine with fresh bay leaves, allspice, cinnamon, dried orange zest, vodka and white rum.  The scent wasn't quite accurate so I admit to adding a couple of drops of bay essential oil (Pimenta racemosa), the optimal variety of bay leaves used in making Bay Rum.

My colognes, including Bay Rum.

More Cologne Experiments

I had such a great time making colognes this summer, and the results were so successful, that I tried my hand at a couple more.  The new brews, Fresh Mown Hay and Bay Rum, did not disappoint.

Fresh Mown Hay is a maceration of sweet woodruff (which is left to rest after harvesting in order to bring out it's distinctive hay like scent), orris root, benzoin, roses, vanilla, lemon verbena, linden blossoms and jasmine flowers.  The woodruff not only gives it it's signature scent but also considerable tenacity.  It is a rich, lush fragrance with an almost edible quality to it and conjures images of rolling in meadows.

Bay Rum was definitely inspired by the vast bay bushes lining most of the coastal areas in the New York area. I've been gathering them and cooking with them for many years and finally came around to making a fragrance. Over the summer I gathered leaves and dried them (I read they yield a better fragrance dried) and did my research on formulary and then started to experiment. Using the rinds of some mandarin oranges and freshly ground cinnamon, allspice and cloves I was able to replicate and expand on the traditional scent.

Cologne Experiment Results

The results are in!  My experiments macerating dried flowers, roost, rinds and herbs are completed and I have detailed notes on the results.  After a month's time the liquor was strained off and clarified and then some were matched with hydrosols.  Certain recipes didn't work at all and were discarded but most of them yielded results.  I was really surprised by the tenacity of the different brews, some of them will last days on a tester strip. 

Summer Splash came as a real surprise.  The floral note that resulted from roses and lavender macerating with vetiver, sweet annie and orange peel was astonishing.  It was blended with lemon balm hydrosol to create a summery splash.  This one changes over time in a most interesting way.

Florida Water epitomizes summer for me. There is a large Latino community intermingled in my Brooklyn neighborhood and a lot of the pharmacies cater to this clientelle so are stocked with Florida Water. I have memories of my first years in Brooklyn discovering the pleasures of an evening shower followed with a splash of Florida Water. Orange blossom and clove are the distinctive notes in the cologne so I decided orange blossom hydrosol would be used with a maceration of meyer lemon rind, sweet woodruff, lavender, benzoin, cinnamon and clove. The results smell surprisingly like the water I used all those years ago, and I think it could be considered suitable for men as well as women.

Verbena Water is the result of macerating fresh lemon verbena and sweet woodruff from my garden, dried jasmine, linden blossoms and vanilla pods and then mixed with verbena hydrosol.  It's as fresh as it sounds, the softness of the woodruff and vanilla pared with lemon verbena counterbalance each other beautifully.

Rose Garden is a blend of dried roses, angelica root, jasmine, vanilla pods and lemon verbena which was then mixed with rosewater to create a veritable rose garden in a bottle.

Violet Water is the result of orris root, sweet woodruff, benzoin and jasmine marrying beautifully to create a woodland violet sort of fragrance which was then blended with cornflower water.  Violets contain a chemical called ionones which give them their characteristic fragrance.  Orris root, the dried and aged rhizome of the Iris pallida, also contains ionones but also has a woodland quality to it.  There are no violets in this blend so the name is merely a suggestion.

Each cologne is bottled in a one of a kind vintage glass bottle collected from the beaches of Brooklyn, NY. They've been scrubbed clean and sterilized but they're old and scratched to different degrees. Expect some wear from tumbling in the ocean for who knows how long.

Cologne Experiments

I'm having way too much fun riding out the heatwave researching old forumlary on the internet in search of cologne and toilet water recipes.  After years of collecting fragrant herbs, dried flowers, roots, powdered gums, tree resins, barks, citrus rinds and spices I wanted to see if macerating in vodka would produce results.  All of the old recipes I found used essential oils, absolutes and tinctures but I wanted to see what I could come up with with just the raw ingredients.

I've started two traditional cologne recipes, a violet water, something akin to 4711 and a Florida Water, as well as one true experiment.  It's been about ten days and I can already tell which ones have promise and staying power.  My plan is to let them sit for 30 days and then strain them off, filter them and let them settle.  Then I'll pour off the clear liquor and blend it with hydrosol.

When deciding on what to use for each experiment I'm still thinking like a perfumer and making sure I have top, middle and bottom notes.  I've been aging some orris root powder for a number of years now and it's developing a subtle sweetness that I hope the tincuring will release.  I also have powdered benzoin, cedar bark, vanilla pods and vetiver roots to play with.  Dried roses and lavender make up the bulk of the heart note but I'm also using a generous supply of jasmine sambac flowers that I've dried over the past year.  The linden blossoms that I collected last year have found their way into one as well.  For top notes I have citrus rinds that I dried over last winter including mineola tangerine and meyer lemon.  From my herb garden I've added sweet woodruff, lemon verbena, lavender, basil, sweet annie and rosemary.

So far I'm loving the process and the romance of it all.  When I was a child my grandmother bought me some cologne that I used as a kind of splash.  I have such fond memories of warm summer nights splashing on her cologne after a bath and going to sleep smelling sweetly.

I'm also enjoying using the fruits of my labor over the years, and feeling like a real apothecary.  I looked around during the process and thought that it looked like a film set of an apothecary at work, yet it wasn't contrived at all.  I find I'm repeating to myself, "oh, true apothecary".