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RASPBERRY VINEGAR
Pour over two quarts of raspberries in a stone jar, one quart of very best vinegar; let stand twenty-four hours, strain, and pour liquor over fresh fruit, and let stand in the same way; allow one pound sugar to a pint of juice; put into a stone jar and set in pot of boiling water one hour; skim well, put into bottles, cork and seal tight. Diluted with water this is very nice for the sick. Toasted bread may be eaten with it.
This is a raspberry shrub — a sweetened fruit vinegar meant to be diluted into a drink. The method is sound; the main things to translate are the vessel, the vinegar strength, and how you store the finished syrup.
- Scale and yieldTwo quarts of raspberries (roughly 2 to 2½ lb) macerated in one quart of vinegar, then strained onto a second lot of fruit, should give you somewhere in the region of a quart of liquor. With sugar added at the rate given the finished syrup will be appreciably more than the liquor you started with. Both figures are rough.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock is what the recipe calls for; stoneware was the standard vessel for this work, and it has the advantage of not reacting with vinegar. Any nonreactive vessel works — glass, stainless steel, or glazed ceramic. Avoid aluminium, copper and unlined cast iron at every stage.
- "Very best vinegar"This means a clean, sound cider or wine vinegar rather than a rough one. Use one labelled around 5 percent acidity; sugar and acid together are what keep the syrup, so do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "drinking vinegar."
- The double infusionSteeping the same vinegar over two batches of fruit is the hinge of the recipe — it is what makes the result taste of raspberry rather than of vinegar. Do not shortcut it. Note that the second batch of berries is additional to the first two quarts.
- Sugar ratioOne pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about 2¼ cups sugar to 2 cups liquid by volume. That heavy proportion is deliberate: it makes a thick syrup that keeps.
- An hour in boiling waterSetting the jar in a pot of boiling water is a water bath: it dissolves the sugar and cooks the syrup gently without scorching. The recipe says an hour; the syrup should be clear and slightly thickened. Skim the foam as it rises or the bottled syrup will look cloudy.
- Bottling and storage"Cork and seal tight" is not a modern canning process. Pour hot into clean bottles, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator, where the sugar and acid will hold it for months. Discard it if it ferments, fizzes or grows a film.
- ServingAbout 2 tablespoons of syrup to a tall glass of cold or iced water. It also works over soda water, and the sharpness suits a strong iced tea.
Fruit vinegars were standard sickroom equipment long before they were bar ingredients. A syrup of raspberry and vinegar was thought both refreshing and mildly cooling for feverish patients, and — unlike milk, broth or fresh fruit — it kept for months in a stoppered bottle, which mattered in a house without refrigeration. The technique of steeping fruit in vinegar and sweetening it heavily is generally traced to older methods of preserving summer fruit without ice; the name shrub, which in the eighteenth century more often denoted a spirit-based drink with citrus and sugar, seems to have attached to the vinegar-and-fruit syrup chiefly in the nineteenth century. Its placement in Buckeye Cookery's "Food For The Sick" chapter, alongside gruels and beef teas, shows how the domestic cookbook doubled as a nursing manual: the housewife was expected to feed the invalid as well as the family, and the suggestion of toasted bread alongside is a nod to the plainest of convalescent diets.