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Raspberry Gin
Put two quarts of freshly-gathered ripe raspberries into a stone spirit jar with two pounds of sugar candy and three pints of unsweetened gin. Cork the jar, and shake it well every day for a month. Put it in a cool place, and at the end of twelve months pour it off carefully, filter, and bottle for use. It ought to be bright and clear.
A cold infusion, so the only real work is measuring and waiting. The instructions are sound; what needs translating are the vessels, the sugar, and the fact that this is a two-stage wait rather than one.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, so two quarts of raspberries is roughly 2.3 litres by volume — about 1.2 kg of fruit. Three imperial pints of gin is 1.7 litres, or a little over two standard 750 ml bottles.
- Sugar candyLarge crystallised sugar, sold now as rock sugar or rock candy. It dissolves slowly, which is the point in a jar that will sit for a year; ordinary granulated sugar in the same weight (900 g) works, it simply goes into solution faster.
- "Unsweetened gin"Victorian gin was frequently sold sweetened — what became known as Old Tom. The instruction is telling you to use the dry style, which is what any modern London dry gin gives you. Avoid flavoured or already-sweetened gins.
- The jarA stone spirit jar means glazed stoneware, the ordinary container for spirits at the time; it is opaque and non-reactive. A large glass jar with a good seal is fine and lets you watch the colour; keep it out of direct light. Do not use anything with a metal lid that touches the liquid.
- Two waits, not oneThe daily shaking runs for a month, and only then does the jar go into a cool place for the rest of the twelve months undisturbed. The shaking month is what gets the sugar into solution early and keeps the extraction even.
- Straining and filteringStrain off the fruit through a sieve first, without pressing it — squeezing the pulp is what makes the finished gin cloudy. Then pass the liquid through a coffee filter or several layers of muslin, as many times as it takes. "Bright and clear" is the test the recipe sets.
- YieldServe in small glasses; with three pints of gin and two pounds of sugar this is a sweet, strong liqueur rather than a drink.
- KeepingOnce bottled and sealed it will hold for years, though the bright red can be expected to fade toward brick over time. The alcohol level is high enough that no other preservation is needed.
Fruit gins belong to a long British tradition of putting a glut of soft fruit into spirit — sloe gin is the survivor, but damson, blackcurrant and raspberry versions were all made domestically through the nineteenth century, when gin was cheap and fresh raspberries kept for barely a day. The long twelve-month rest is characteristic of the period's household cordials, made in high summer against the following winter, and it suggests a household with cellar space and no expectation of immediate results. Sugar candy was often used in such preparations, partly for its slow dissolution and partly because it was regarded as purer than the ordinary refined sugars then on sale.