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Raspberry Vinegar, to Make
Put two quarts of good white-wine vinegar into a large stone jar with two quarts of picked raspberries. Tie a piece of muslin over the top, and let the jar stand for a week, stirring every day. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve, and with every pint put one pound of loaf sugar. Stir these ingredients together, and when the sugar is dissolved cover the jar. Put it into a saucepan of boiling water, and let it boil gently for an hour, carefully removing the scum as it rises. When cold cork and bottle the vinegar, and seal the corks. Some cooks put a glassful of brandy with each pint of raspberry vinegar. A glazed jar must be avoided, as it will make the contents unwholesome. Time, eight days.
A classic fruit shrub: raspberries steeped in vinegar, sweetened heavily and cooked gently in a water bath. The method is sound and needs little more than unit conversion and a note on vessels.
- The vessel is the hingeThe warning against a glazed jar is about lead: nineteenth-century earthenware glazes leached badly under prolonged contact with vinegar. Use glass, food-grade plastic or stainless steel, and avoid aluminium, copper and unlined cast iron, which react with acid. Do not use decorative or antique glazed crockery of unknown origin.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts by imperial measure is roughly 2.3 litres each of vinegar and berries (nearer 1.9 litres if reckoned in US quarts); a quart of raspberries by volume weighs somewhere around a pound and a half. Loaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Sugar ratioOne pound of sugar to a pint of strained liquor works out at roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar to an imperial pint (20 fl oz) of liquid. That is deliberately high — the sugar is what makes the syrup keep — but the result is a concentrate, not a drink.
- The steeping weekA week at room temperature under muslin, with the eighth day covering the boiling and cooling; the daily stir keeps the fruit submerged and discourages surface mould. Skim or discard any fuzzy growth rather than stirring it in.
- Boiling in a saucepan of waterThis is a water bath, not direct heat: the jar sits in simmering water so the syrup never scorches. The jar is covered, so the hour is about heating the syrup through and dissolving the sugar completely rather than reducing it.
- StrainingA fine sieve leaves a slightly cloudy syrup. For a clear one, let it drip through a jelly bag or double muslin without pressing; pressing the pulp forces through sediment.
- The brandyA "glassful" here is vague, though a wineglassful was usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Two tablespoons per pint is enough to give the flavour without dominating the fruit.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve 1 to 2 tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water; it also works over ice cream or whisked into a vinaigrette.
- Keeping itBottle into scalded glass bottles. Sealed, it keeps for months in a cool dark cupboard; once opened, refrigerate and use within a couple of months.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of drinking vinegars — shrubs, and before them the medicinal oxymels of honey and vinegar — that gave households a way to hold summer fruit through the year without ice. In Victorian Britain it did double duty: diluted with cold water it was drunk as a cooling refresher, and it was widely given, warm, for sore throats and feverish colds, which is why it turns up in domestic medicine columns as often as in cookery books. Cassell's carries it as an entry of its own, 'Raspberry Vinegar, to Make', in the manner of an alphabetical dictionary. The instruction to avoid a glazed jar is the most telling line of the entry — lead-glazed earthenware attacked by fruit acids was a recognised cause of poisoning long before food safety was regulated, and careful writers of the period repeated the warning whenever vinegar was to stand for days.