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Raspberry Shrub
Place red raspberries in a stone jar, cover them with good cider vinegar, let stand over night; next morning strain, and to one pint of juice add one pint of sugar, boil ten minutes, and bottle while hot.-Mrs. Judge West.
A vinegar-and-fruit syrup meant to be diluted with cold water, not drunk straight. The proportions are sound; the only real gaps are the fruit quantity and how to keep the finished bottles.
- How much fruitThe recipe gives no weight, so any ratio is a guess. Around 2 lb (about 6 cups) of raspberries with just enough cider vinegar to cover is a reasonable starting point; the volume of strained juice will vary with how much the pulp holds back, so measure it before adding sugar. Crushing the berries lightly before adding the vinegar speeds extraction.
- The stone jarGlazed stoneware was the usual vessel for steeping in vinegar, which corrodes bare metal. Glass, glazed ceramic or food-grade plastic all work; avoid aluminium, copper and unlined cast iron, which can corrode and taint the syrup.
- Cider vinegarNineteenth-century cider vinegar was not standardised and its strength varied. Ordinary 5% supermarket cider vinegar is a reasonable substitute; unfiltered gives a rounder flavour.
- Strain, do not press hardPour through a fine sieve or jelly bag and let it drip. Forcing the pulp through clouds the syrup and carries seed grit into the bottles.
- Sugar by volume"One pint of sugar" is a volume measure, about 14 oz or 400 g of granulated. Equal volumes of juice and sugar give a syrup that keeps well and dilutes cleanly.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes at a full boil is enough to dissolve the sugar and set the keeping quality. Longer drives off the fresh raspberry aroma and starts pushing the syrup toward jelly consistency.
- Bottling and storageFilling clean, hot bottles and sealing at once was the period method, and the high acid and sugar do most of the preserving work. Without a proper water-bath process, treat the bottles as refrigerator stock and use within a few months.
- ServingAbout 2 tablespoons of syrup to a tall glass of cold or sparkling water. A pint of finished shrub makes roughly sixteen drinks.
Shrub in this sense comes from the Arabic sharāb, meaning drink, the same root behind sherbet and syrup. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American households it covered two related things: a spirituous fruit cordial, and this teetotal vinegar syrup, which used acid rather than alcohol to hold summer fruit through the year. Vinegar drinks had a long domestic pedigree, switchel — usually described as molasses with vinegar — being often said to have served as a field drink for harvest crews, and raspberry shrub was the parlour version of the same idea. Its place in the Drinks chapter of a book like Buckeye Cookery, alongside lemonades and ginger beers rather than punches, is sometimes read as a sign of the temperance current in Ohio households of the 1870s and 1880s, where a cold shrub might be the respectable answer to what to offer a caller in August. The attribution to a contributor by her husband's title, Mrs. Judge West, is typical of the book, which is generally said to have been assembled from recipes gathered among church and community women.