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Strawberry Vinegar
This vinegar is excellent for flavouring sweet sauces, and a spoonful or two put into a tumblerful of cold water forms a refreshing summer drink. Gather the fruit in dry weather, when it is fully ripe and finely flavoured. Let it be quite fresh. Pick and weigh it, and put it into stone jars or wide-mouthed glass bottles, and over each pound pour a quart of best white-wine vinegar. Cover the jars closely, and let the strawberries infuse in the vinegar for three days. Drain it off, and put it upon fresh fruit. Let this stand three days, and repeat the operation a third time. Drain off the liquor closely, and let it run through a canvas bag dipped in vinegar. Measure it, and stir into it until almost dissolved a pound of sugar broken up small for each pint of vinegar. Put it in an enamelled (not a metal) saucepan over a clear fire, and let it boil gently for five minutes. Pour it out, let it stand twelve minutes, skim it thoroughly, and bottle for use. Time, ten days. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pint.
A fruit shrub in the old sense: strawberries steeped three times in wine vinegar, then boiled with sugar into a syrup for sauces and cold drinks. Nothing here is difficult, but the ratios and vessels are worth translating.
- The hinge: three infusions, one vinegarThe same quart of vinegar is drained and poured over fresh fruit twice more, so a finished quart takes about 3 lb of strawberries in total. Skipping to a single steep gives a thin, sharp syrup with little fruit character.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz (about 1.14 litres) and an imperial pint 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), so the sugar ratio is a pound to 20 fl oz of strained vinegar — a very heavy syrup by modern taste. Reducing the sugar is possible but shortens keeping time.
- Don't press the fruit"Drain off the liquor closely" most likely means drain it as completely as possible; whatever the sense, squeezing the berries or the bag forces pulp into the syrup and clouds it.
- The canvas bagA jelly bag or double muslin does the job. Wetting it with vinegar rather than water presumably avoids diluting the first liquid to pass through a water-soaked bag.
- Enamelled, not metalAcetic acid attacks copper, aluminium and unlined cast iron, picking up metallic flavours and, in the case of copper, worse. Stainless steel, enamelled cast iron or a glass-lined pan are all fine; the original's warning still stands for unlined metals.
- "A clear fire"A fire or flame burning bright, without smoke or flare -- in practice moderate, steady heat. Five minutes at a gentle boil is enough to dissolve the sugar; hard boiling risks driving off the fresh strawberry aroma.
- The twelve minutesAs printed this is a short rest before skimming, which is when the scum rises and firms enough to lift cleanly. A longer rest gives a clearer bottle.
- Bottling and keepingBottle hot into clean, hot bottles and seal; the acid and sugar do the preserving, but heat-treating the bottles avoids surface mould. Store cool and dark, and refrigerate once opened.
- Yield and useRoughly 3 lb of strawberries and a quart of vinegar give a little over a quart of finished syrup. Reckon 1 to 2 tablespoons in a tall glass of cold water or soda, or a spoonful stirred into a sweet sauce or over a fruit pudding.
Fruit vinegars belong to the family of drinks called shrubs — the word generally traced to the Arabic sharāb, "a drink" — in which sugar and an acid, here vinegar rather than citrus, preserve summer fruit as a concentrate to be diluted at need. Raspberry vinegar was the commonest English version and turns up in nineteenth-century cookbooks both as a summer refresher and as a household remedy for sore throats; strawberry is its sweeter cousin. The recipe's own opening gives it a double use, as a flavouring for sweet sauces as much as a beverage. The technique is older than refrigeration and explains itself: a glut of ripe fruit, a cheap acid, and a jar in a cool larder produced a keeping syrup, and did so without alcohol.