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Raspberry Shrub
Pour one quart of vinegar over three quarts of raspberries and let stand over night, then let drain in a jelly bag. To each pint of juice add one pound of sugar; let boil half an hour.
Bottle when cold.
This is a drinking vinegar concentrate, not a preserve to be spooned from the jar — a spoonful or two in a glass of cold water makes the finished drink. The proportions are workable as written, but the vinegar and the bottling both need a note.
- What vinegar to useCider vinegar was the common household vinegar in American kitchens of this period, generally around 4-5% acidity, and suits this well. Distilled white vinegar works but tastes harsh against raspberry; wine vinegar is closer in character to the original.
- QuantitiesThree quarts of raspberries is roughly 3 1/2 to 3 3/4 lb, or four to five 12-oz clamshells. Expect roughly 5-6 cups (2 1/2 to 3 pints) of strained liquid from the quart of vinegar plus the fruit juice, which means about 2 1/2 to 3 lb of sugar at the ratio given.
- Overnight steepingCover the bowl and refrigerate rather than leaving it on the counter. Use a nonreactive container — glass, stainless, or glazed ceramic — since vinegar will pull metal off aluminum or bare cast iron.
- The jelly bagA jelly bag is a cone of closely woven cloth on a stand; a colander lined with two layers of damp cheesecloth does the same work. Let it drip and resist squeezing, which pushes pulp through and clouds the syrup.
- Half an hour of boilingThis is a long boil by modern standards and it will drive off much of the vinegar's aroma while thickening the syrup considerably. Fifteen minutes at a steady boil gives a pourable concentrate with more fruit flavor; go the full half hour only if you want something near jelly consistency.
- Bottling coldBottling when cold means this is not a sealed, shelf-stable preserve. Pour into clean bottles and refrigerate, where the acid and sugar will hold it for several months. If you want it in the pantry, fill sterilized jars hot and process them in a boiling-water bath.
- Yield and servingYield depends on how far you take the boil; expect appreciably less than the volume of sweetened juice you started with. One to two tablespoons per tall glass of cold or sparkling water; it also does well over ice with a splash of gin or rum.
"Shrub" comes from the Arabic sharāb, meaning a drink, by way of the sweetened fruit syrups that entered English kitchens — the word is attested in English for a drink in the eighteenth century, the OED citing around 1747 — the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup. Two distinct drinks ended up sharing the name: a spirit-based punch of rum or brandy with citrus, and this vinegar-and-fruit version, which colonial and nineteenth-century American households favored because it kept without alcohol and without ice. Vinegar here is doing preservative work as much as flavoring, and the enormous sugar load does the rest; the combination is why a bottle of shrub was said to sit in a cellar through a summer. Raspberry was the classic choice, being abundant in July, and shrub turns up in canning manuals of this period alongside the jellies and the catsups precisely because it belongs to that same logic of putting up a glut before it spoils.