Home › The Principles of Cookery › RASPBERRY VINEGAR (another way) (Take a quantity of very ripe)
RASPBERRY VINEGAR (another way) (Take a quantity of very ripe)
Take a quantity of very ripe raspberries, and fill a wide-mouthed bottle or stone jar with as many of them as will go in without pressing them; take as much good vinegar as will entirely cover them, and pour it over. Let the raspberries infuse for eight days, at the end of which time pour the whole on a tamis, and press the fruit so as to extract all the juice; when the vinegar is perfectly clear and impregnated with the fragrance of the fruit, weigh it, and for every pound of liquor take a pound and three-quarters of good lump sugar broken into large pieces; put it into an earthen jar, and pour the vinegar over it, then cork it well, and put it into the bain-marie over a very moderate fire; as soon as the sugar is dissolved set it aside, and when the syrup is almost cold bottle it.
A fruit shrub in the older sense: a sweetened, fragrant vinegar syrup meant to be diluted rather than drunk neat. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the sealed jar in the water bath need translating.
- The hinge: never boil the syrupThe jar goes into a bain-marie (a pan of hot water) over a very moderate fire only until the sugar dissolves. Boiling drives off the volatile raspberry aroma and dulls the vinegar's sharpness, which is the entire point of the preparation.
- Do not cork it tight while heatingThe instruction to cork the jar before it enters the water bath is unsafe practice with modern airtight closures. Rest a lid on loosely, or cover with foil, so pressure cannot build; cork or seal only once the syrup is cold.
- Weighing the liquorA pound of the strained vinegar is roughly 2 cups, so a pound and three-quarters of sugar comes to about 4 cups per 2 cups of liquid. That is a true syrup, not a drink, and it wants diluting at about one part syrup to six or eight parts cold water.
- Lump sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sold in solid cones and broken up as needed. Plain granulated sugar is the same thing and dissolves faster; there is no need to seek out sugar cubes.
- TamisA tamis is a fine sieve or straining cloth stretched on a hoop. A jelly bag, or a sieve lined with damp muslin, does the job. Press the fruit for yield if you want volume; leave it to drip if you want a clearer syrup.
- Vinegar to useChoose a clean 5 per cent acidity cider or white wine vinegar. Malt vinegar overpowers the fruit, and cheap distilled vinegar tastes of nothing but acid.
- The eight-day infusionKeep the jar covered and in a cool, dark place, not on a sunny windowsill. Fruit flies are the real risk during a week-long open steep; a cloth tied over the mouth is enough.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantities; how much syrup you end up with depends on how much fruit you start with and how much vinegar it takes to cover it. Bottled and refrigerated it keeps for months; the sugar concentration does most of the preserving.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of drinks called shrubs, from the Arabic sharāb, meaning simply a drink, and it was long a fixture of the English still-room. Before refrigeration, vinegar and sugar together held the flavour of a summer fruit through the winter far more reliably than juice alone, and the resulting syrup was diluted with cold water in hot weather, with hot water in cold, and given to invalids for sore throats. The technique survives largely unchanged in modern drinking vinegars and in the raspberry vinegar sold for dressing salads, which is made without the sugar.