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Raspberry Shrub
Add to eight quarts of fine ripe black raspberries sufficient vinegar to reach the top, but not to cover them. Let stand in a stone jar for twenty-four hours. Then strain through a colander, mashing the berries well. Strain again through cheesecloth, and measure the juice.
Allow one pound of sugar for one pound of juice. Put the juice in a preserving kettle and let it boil for twenty minutes; add the sugar and boil ten minutes longer. Seal in fruit jars or bottles.
Strawberry shrub may be made in the same way.
A vinegar-based fruit syrup meant to be diluted with cold water, not drunk straight. The whole method is weight-for-weight sugar to juice, so a scale matters more than measuring cups here.
- Scale it downEight quarts of raspberries is roughly 10 lb of fruit and will fill a large crock. A quarter batch — 2 quarts of berries — behaves identically and is far easier to handle.
- The vinegar level"Sufficient vinegar to reach the top, but not to cover them" means the fruit sits in liquid but the topmost berries stay proud of it. Use plain cider or white wine vinegar of ordinary 5 percent strength; a strongly flavoured balsamic or malt will dominate the raspberry.
- Stone jar, and why it mattersThe vinegar rules out reactive metal at every stage. Use glass, glazed stoneware or food-grade plastic for the 24-hour steep, and stainless steel or enamel for the boiling — an old-fashioned copper or brass preserving kettle will react with the acid.
- A pound of juiceWeigh it. Two cups of the strained liquid weighs a little over a pound, but a pound of granulated sugar measures nearer 2 1/4 cups, so cup-for-cup measuring is only a rough approximation of the recipe's weight-for-weight rule — weighing is quicker and exact.
- Boiling timesThe first 20-minute boil concentrates the juice before the sugar goes in; skim the froth that rises. Ten minutes after the sugar is enough to dissolve it fully and thicken slightly — this is a pourable syrup, not a jelly, so do not chase a set.
- SealingHot-fill clean bottles or jars and either process in a boiling-water bath or, more simply, refrigerate once cool. The sugar and acid make this a stable keeper, but a bare screw lid on a cooling jar is not a seal by modern standards.
- Yield and servingA quarter batch gives roughly a quart of syrup. Serve about 2 tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water over ice; it also does well over ice cream or brushed onto a plain cake.
Shrub in this sense comes from the Arabic sharāb, "a drink" — the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup — and appears in English in the eighteenth century, first as a spirit-and-citrus punch base and later, in American cookery, as this vinegar-and-fruit concentrate. Before refrigeration, vinegar was one practical way to hold summer fruit flavour into winter: the acid checks spoilage, the long boil with an equal weight of sugar does the rest, and the result keeps in a cool cellar for months. Raspberry was among the commonest versions, valued as a hot-weather drink, and such recipes often appear in beverage chapters alongside lemonades and ginger ale rather than among the preserves. The closing note that strawberry may be substituted reflects how interchangeable soft fruit was in this formula — currants, blackberries and cherries also turn up in similar recipes.