Is rowan berry vegetarian-compatible?

Watch for

• Raw rowan is an emetic, not a snack berry.Parasorbic acid is an irritant lactone concentrated in the fresh fruit, and a handful straight off the tree is a reliable way to spend an evening being sick. This is not a dose-dependent sensitivity that some people escape, it affects everyone
• Cooking or freezing is the fix, and it works because it chemically changes the compound rather than diluting it.Simmering the fruit, or leaving it through a hard frost or a spell in the freezer, hydrolyses parasorbic acid to sorbic acid. Sorbic acid was first isolated from rowan oil in the nineteenth century and named after the tree, and it is now the preservative E200 and E202. If sorbate preservatives are on your personal avoid list, note that cooked rowan is delivering the same compound naturally
• The sugar alcohol in your jelly is named after this tree.Sorbitol takes its name from Sorbus, because that is where it was first isolated, and rowan carries a genuine polyol load. Our FODMAP columns for rowan are unrated rather than low, and in this particular case unrated should not be read as reassuring. Treat rowan jelly as a polyol exposure and start with a teaspoon
• Moderate on salicylates.That is the one graded trigger on the page worth planning around, and the jelly concentrates it, since a jar represents a great deal of fruit boiled down
• The seeds carry small amounts of cyanogenic glycoside in the way apple pips do.Standard practice strains the cooked pulp through a jelly bag, which removes them, so this is a reason to follow the recipe rather than to blend whole berries into something
• Rowan jelly is almost always made with crab apple or another high-pectin fruit and roughly its own weight in sugar.If a spoonful disagrees with you, the apple and the sugar are part of what you ate