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Raspberry Royal
Use four quarts of best berries. Pour over them one quart cider vinegar and add one pound sugar, mashing all to a paste. Let stand in sun four hours, when strain off juice and add one pint brandy. Bottle, seal, and place in cellar.
RASPBERRY VINEGAR (For Cooking or Table Use) Mix twelve pounds sugar with three gallons water and six quarts raspberry juice. Let fruit pulp stand in another gallon of water with a pound of sugar and three tablespoons yeast till well worked up once, when strain and place with the rest of the liquor in a cask.
Two related preparations run together: a brandied raspberry shrub, and a large-batch raspberry vinegar meant for a cask. Both are period drinking-vinegar recipes, and both assume a household with a cellar and a summer glut of fruit.
- Quantities in modern termsFour quarts of raspberries is a dry measure here, roughly 5 to 6 lb of fruit. One quart of cider vinegar is 4 cups, and a pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups granulated.
- Use 5 percent vinegarOrdinary bottled cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is a reasonable modern stand-in; the recipe names no strength, and home cider vinegar of the period varied. The acid is doing the preserving work alongside the sugar and brandy, so do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "drinking" vinegar.
- "Let stand in sun four hours"The sun is there for gentle warmth, to soften the fruit and speed extraction. A covered non-reactive bowl on a warm counter, or a low oven turned off, does the same thing without insects; cover with muslin either way. Never use a metal bowl that is not stainless — copper, aluminium and untinned iron will react with the vinegar.
- StrainingMash thoroughly, then drip through a jelly bag or double muslin rather than pressing hard, or the finished shrub will be cloudy and full of sediment. A slow drip overnight in the refrigerator gives the clearest result.
- The brandyA pint of brandy into roughly two quarts of strained sweet-sour juice puts the finished bottle around 8 to 10 percent alcohol. That, with the acid and sugar, is what makes it keep. Any plain grape brandy works; the original would not have been expensive.
- Bottling and "cellar"Sterilise the bottles, fill leaving a little headspace, and cork or cap tightly. A cellar meant a dark place at 50-60F; a cupboard away from light is fine, and the refrigerator is better once a bottle is opened. Yield is roughly two quarts of finished cordial.
- How to drink itNo serving instruction is given. Shrubs of this type were normally taken diluted: an inch or two in a tumbler, topped with cold or sparkling water. It also works as a glaze for duck or pork, or spooned over ice cream.
- The second recipe is a different animalTwelve pounds of sugar, three gallons of water and six quarts of juice makes over four gallons — a cask batch, not a kitchen one. "Three tablespoons yeast" almost certainly means a wet barm or brewer's yeast slurry, not modern dried yeast, and no conversion can be given honestly. Note too that no acetic starter and no timing are specified, and the text gives no indication of how long the cask was to stand or how souring was to happen. If you want raspberry vinegar, work from a current recipe with a live vinegar mother and a measured acidity check.
- Scaling down the vinegarIf you attempt the second at any size, ferment in a vessel with plenty of surface area and free air, covered with cloth. Acetic bacteria need oxygen; a sealed cask of sweet raspberry liquor will simply make weak wine and may build pressure.
Vinegar-and-fruit cordials of this kind were called shrubs, from the Arabic sharāb, meaning a drink, and they were a standard way of turning a soft-fruit glut into something that would last the year. Raspberry vinegar in particular was a fixture of nineteenth-century American and British households: diluted with cold water it was drunk as a cooling summer drink, and it also appears in period sources as a sickroom offering for feverish patients who would not take plain water. The brandied version here is the parlour form, closer to a liqueur, while the cask recipe that follows is straightforward provisioning — twelve pounds of sugar at a time speaks to a household expecting to draw on the barrel for a long while. Both belong to a period when the raspberry crop came in all at once and had to be dealt with within days, before refrigeration and long before a jar of berries could be bought in February.