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Mulberry Vinegar
Put six pounds of ripe mulberries into an earthenware pan, and pour over them vinegar to cover. When they have soaked twenty-four hours, bruise them with a wooden spoon, and cover with a cloth for another twenty-four hours; bruise, and mix well; add more vinegar, until nearly a gallon has been poured upon them. When they have stood a week (they should be stirred daily during the time), strain off the vinegar, to every pint add a pound of loaf sugar, and boil and skim well for five minutes. To be used like raspberry vinegar.
A fruit shrub in the old sense: a sweetened vinegar syrup diluted with water for a cold drink, or spooned over puddings. The method is sound, but the quantities and vessels need translating.
- Vessel"Earthenware pan" means an unglazed-outside crock or glazed stoneware bowl, chosen because it does not react with acid. Glass, food-grade plastic or a stainless bowl all work; do not use aluminium, copper or bare cast iron at any stage, including the boiling.
- Which vinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar; malt or cider vinegar would be the likely household choice, and modern bottles of either are usually around 5 per cent acidity. Avoid anything labelled below 5 per cent, and avoid distilled white vinegar unless you want the fruit flavour flattened.
- A gallonAn imperial gallon, so about 4.5 litres or 19 US cups. Six pounds of mulberries is about 2.7 kg. Both are scalable: quarter the recipe and you still get a useful two or three bottles.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar in a cone, broken up for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent. A pound to a pint is a very heavy syrup by modern eyes, but the sugar is doing preservative work as well as sweetening.
- The strainingPour through a jelly bag or double muslin and let it drip rather than squeezing, or the syrup goes cloudy and carries pulp that can ferment later. Expect to lose a good deal of liquid to the fruit.
- The five-minute boilSkim the scum as it rises and stop at five minutes. Longer boiling drives off the volatile fruit aroma and pushes the syrup toward a jam-like set, which is not what is wanted here.
- Bottling and keepingBottle hot into clean, hot bottles and cap when cool. Refrigerate after opening; the acid and sugar together keep it for months, but mould on the surface means the batch should go.
- ServingAbout two tablespoons to a tumbler of cold or sparkling water. It is also good over vanilla ice cream, in a vinaigrette, or as a deglazing splash for duck or pork.
Fruit vinegars were a common feature of the nineteenth-century British household, made in the summer glut and drawn on all year: raspberry was the common one, with blackcurrant, blackberry and mulberry as variations. Diluted with water they were given to the feverish and the thirsty alike, and older domestic manuals recommend them for sore throats. Mulberries were a garden fruit rather than a market one, a tree of manor gardens, and the fruit crushes and stains so readily that it rarely travelled, which is exactly why a recipe like this exists: it turns an unsellable, short-lived crop into something bottled. The technique, sugar plus vinegar plus fruit, is the same one that produced the American colonial shrub, and it has come back into bar use under that name.