Home › Preserving › Spiced Raspberries for Meat
Spiced Raspberries for Meat
Raspberries left from raspberry vinegar. 1/2 cup boiling water. Raspberries left from rasp- 2 strips stick cinnamon berry vinegar 4 cups sugar cup boiling water 1 dozen cloves tied in cheese-cloth Simmer all the ingredients together for one hour; pick out the spices and store the berries in jelly glasses. If the seeds are objectionable, press the berries through a purée sieve before adding the sugar.
This is a by-product recipe: it starts with the drained fruit left behind after making raspberry vinegar, so no berry quantity is given. Everything else follows from judging that pulp by eye.
- The missing quantityThe original assumes you have just strained a batch of raspberry vinegar and are holding the spent fruit. Four cups of sugar implies a substantial quantity of pulp, though the recipe never says how much; with a small amount of fruit, scale the sugar down or you will end up with candy rather than a relish.
- What the berries already areFruit from raspberry vinegar has been steeped in vinegar and pressed, so it is sour, soft and largely juiceless. That acidity, together with the heavy sugar, is what helps the finished preserve keep, and it is what makes it work against meat. Fresh raspberries substituted here give a much sweeter, flatter result.
- Units"Cup boiling water" is one cup. Stick cinnamon means whole stick, not ground; "2 strips" indicates two pieces of quill. The dozen cloves are tied in cheesecloth so that, as the recipe directs, they can be picked out before storing.
- The hour of simmeringAn hour over low heat is not for safety but for texture. The mixture should reduce to the consistency of a loose jam that mounds on a spoon. Keep the heat gentle and stir toward the end, since a thick sugar-and-fruit mass scorches quickly.
- SievingIf you press the pulp through a sieve, do it before the sugar goes in, as the recipe says. Once sugar is dissolved the mixture is too syrupy to push through a screen and you will lose most of it in the mesh.
- Storage"Jelly glasses" in this period were sealed with a poured paraffin cap, which is no longer considered a reliable seal. Treat this as a refrigerator preserve, good for a few weeks, or process it in half-pint jars by a current water-bath schedule for soft spreads.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on how much spent pulp you started with, which the recipe does not state. It is a condiment in the mould of cranberry sauce or cumberland sauce: cold lamb, ham, venison, duck, or a sharp cheese.
Raspberry vinegar was a fixture of nineteenth-century American and British households, a sweetened fruit-vinegar syrup diluted with water as a summer drink and dosed to invalids with sore throats. Making it left a mound of drained, sour pulp, and some preserving manuals of the period appear to have refused to throw it out: cooked down with sugar and whole spices it became a sweet-sharp relish for cold meat, the same role played by spiced currants, spiced gooseberries and spiced plums elsewhere in books of this kind. The whole spices are tied in cheesecloth and the recipe directs that they be picked out before storing.