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RASPBERRY RELISH
To each pint of berry juice add one pound of sugar.
Let it stand over night; next morning boil ten minutes, and bottle for use.
This is a raspberry syrup under another name — fruit juice and sugar, macerated overnight and boiled briefly. The original assumes you already have strained berry juice on hand and that the bottles will go to a cool cellar.
- The proportions in modern termsA pint of juice is 2 cups; a pound of granulated sugar is about 2¼ cups. That works out to roughly a 1:1 ratio by weight, a high enough sugar concentration to help the syrup keep, though not enough on its own to make it shelf-stable.
- Getting the juiceCrush ripe raspberries, warm them gently until they collapse, then drain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth. Do not press hard if you want a clear syrup; about 2 lb of berries yields a pint of juice.
- Why it stands overnightThe rest dissolves the sugar completely in the cold juice, so the boil is short and the flavour stays fresh rather than cooked. Stir once or twice before it goes to bed and again in the morning.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes at a full boil is enough to thicken slightly and drive off surface foam; skim it as it rises. Boil much longer and you head toward jelly, though raspberries are not especially high in pectin.
- Bottling and keepingThis is not a tested canning procedure by current standards. Pour boiling hot into clean jars and refrigerate, or freeze in small containers; if you want a shelf-stable product, follow a current water-bath processing method for fruit syrups.
- How it was meant to be usedIf it belonged among the sickroom recipes, the intended use would be a spoonful or two stirred into a tumbler of cold water or crushed ice, as a drink for someone feverish. It is equally good over pudding or in soda water.
- YieldEach pint of juice gives roughly a pint and a half of syrup. Scale freely — the ratio holds at any volume.
Fruit syrups and vinegars occupy a whole corner of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, where the aim was to make water palatable to a patient who could not eat. Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) devotes a section to "Food for the Sick," which may reflect the fact that nursing was household work, and that a cook was expected to have something acid and cooling standing by. The word "relish" here seems to carry its older sense of a thing that gives savour or appetite rather than a chopped pickle; raspberry shrub, raspberry vinegar and this sugared juice all belong to the same family of thirst-drinks. Sugar at a pound to the pint is doing double duty as flavour and as preservative: a fruit preparation made very sweet was less hospitable to mould, and before reliable home canning that was one of the defences available.