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Raspberry Vinegar, Superior
Put one pound of picked raspberries into a stone jar or large glass bottle, and pour over them a quart of white-wine vinegar. Cover them closely, and let them infuse for four days. Drain off the liquor, and pour it over a pound of fresh raspberries; let these infuse for four days, and then repeat the process a third time. When the liquor is poured off, the fruit should each time be laid in a sieve covered with muslin, and the juice should be allowed to drop from it without pressure for several hours. A considerable quantity may thus be preserved. Put the vinegar into an enamelled pan, or, failing this, into a perfectly clean brass pan, and with it a pound of roughly-powdered sugar to each pint of vinegar. Let it boil gently for five minutes, and remove the scum till it ceases to rise. Leave the vinegar until the next day, put it into bottles, and cork lightly. At the end of five days cork closely, and seal the corks. Store in a dry, cool place. When there is a garden the raspberries may be gathered and thrown into the vinegar as they ripen, until the requisite quantity has been obtained. Infusion for an additional day or two will not injure the preparation. Time, a fortnight. Probable cost, 1s. per pint.
This is a shrub syrup rather than a salad vinegar: a triple-infused raspberry extract preserved with a heavy load of sugar. The method is sound, but two details in the original need adjusting before you start.
- Do not use the brass panCassell's offers a "perfectly clean brass pan" as the fallback, which was normal practice in the 1880s and is not now. Hot sugared vinegar is aggressive enough to dissolve copper and zinc from the alloy. Use stainless steel or an enamelled pan only, and a plastic or stainless sieve rather than tinned wire.
- Quart and pintThese are imperial: a quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups, and a pint is 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. If you scale by US measures the fruit-to-vinegar ratio shifts noticeably, so weigh the raspberries against the actual volume of vinegar you use.
- The vinegar itselfModern bottled white wine vinegar generally runs somewhere around 5 to 7 per cent acetic acid, which is the working range here. Avoid anything labelled "cleaning vinegar" and avoid low-acid artisanal vinegars, since the acidity is what keeps the infusion sound over the twelve days at room temperature.
- Sugar quantityA pound of sugar per pint of liquid is about 450 g to 570 ml, which yields a thick syrup, not a drinking vinegar. That density is deliberate and is half the preservation. Cutting it produces something that must be refrigerated and used within weeks.
- Drain, never pressThe instruction to let the fruit drip through muslin "without pressure for several hours" is the hinge of the recipe. Squeezing the pulp forces through pectin and fine solids that cloud the finished syrup and can make it set to a jelly once boiled with the sugar.
- Skimming and the five minutesBoil gently and lift the scum as it forms; the grey froth is protein and fruit solids, and leaving it in gives a muddy syrup that keeps less well. Five minutes is enough to dissolve the sugar and drive off the froth without cooking away the raspberry aroma.
- Cork lightly, then sealThe staged corking allows any residual gas to escape before the bottles are closed for good. Modern equivalents are a loosely fitted screw cap for the first five days, then tightened; use glass, since the acidity attacks metal lids without a lined interior.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of raspberries in all, a fresh pound at each of the three infusions of the same quart of vinegar, gives roughly a litre or more of syrup once the sugar is dissolved into it. Serve about 1 tablespoon in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water, or use it to deglaze pan juices for duck or pork.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of drinks known as shrubs, fruit preserved in vinegar and sugar and then let down with water, which appear in English household books from the eighteenth century onwards and were valued as much for their keeping quality as their flavour. A strong acid syrup was one of several ways to hold a summer fruit crop in a form that would survive in the larder, and raspberry vinegar in particular was a common sickroom standby, given in hot water for a sore throat. The note about gathering fruit into the vinegar "as they ripen" gives away the intended reader: a household with its own canes, harvesting a handful at a time rather than buying a pound at market. The costing at a shilling a pint is a reminder that these books expected the cook to justify the outlay in the account book.