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Grandmother's Harvest Drink
One quart of water, table-spoon sifted ginger, three heaping table-spoons sugar, half pint vinegar.
This is switchel, the drink field hands carried to the harvest, and it is nothing more than four ingredients stirred together cold. The proportions are strong by modern taste, so mix it, then judge it.
- YieldAbout five cups, or four modest glasses. Halve or double freely; nothing here depends on precise ratios.
- "Sifted ginger"Dried ground ginger, pushed through a sieve to break up lumps -- ginger sold loose from a barrel caked badly. Modern jarred ground ginger needs no sifting. A tablespoon is a lot; start with two teaspoons if you have not drunk switchel before.
- The vinegarHalf a pint is one cup, and in an Ohio kitchen of the 1870s it would most likely have been homemade cider vinegar, softer and fruitier than today's distilled white. Cider vinegar is the better choice here; white vinegar tastes harsher.
- Getting the ginger to behaveGround ginger will not dissolve. Whisk it with the sugar and a little of the water into a slurry first, then add the rest, or stir the jug again before each pour. Some cooks steep the ginger in a cup of boiling water for ten minutes and add cold water after, which gives a clearer, less gritty drink.
- SugarThree heaping tablespoons is somewhere between a quarter and a third of a cup. The sugar may well have been less refined than modern white granulated; a spoonful of molasses or maple syrup in place of some of the sugar is closer to other switchel recipes.
- ServingServe very cold over ice. It improves after an hour or two in the refrigerator as the ginger's heat comes forward, and it keeps several days -- the vinegar sees to that.
Vinegar-and-ginger drinks under the names switchel, haymaker's punch and harvest drink were standard summer field refreshment across the northeastern and midwestern United States through the nineteenth century, and the grandmother in the title places this one a generation or two before Buckeye Cookery itself (1877). The logic was practical: water alone was often suspect and seldom cold, while vinegar made a jug of well water palatable and cut the taste of dust, and the sharpness was said to be safer for an overheated body than cold plain water. Molasses is often described as the usual sweetener in New England versions; the sugar here suggests a household with easy access to it. The drink is a close relative of shrub and of the old apothecary's oxymel, honey and vinegar, and it has returned in recent years under its older name as a non-alcoholic mixer.