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Raspberry Acid
Dissolve five ounces tartaric acid in two quarts water, and pour it over twelve pounds berries. Let it stand twenty-four hours, and the strain without bruising the fruit. To each pint clear juice add one pound and a half dissolved sugar, and leave a few days. If a slight fermentation takes place, delay corking a few days. Then cork and seal.--Mrs. G.
This is a raspberry cordial syrup — "acid" here means the tartaric acid that both extracts the juice and preserves it. The finished product is a concentrate to be diluted with cold or sparkling water, not a drink in itself.
- The hinge: strain, do not pressLetting the fruit sit in acid water for a day draws the juice out on its own. Crushing or squeezing the berries pushes pulp and pectin through, and the result clouds and later gels instead of pouring clear.
- Tartaric acidFive ounces is about 140 g, sold today as food-grade tartaric acid in the winemaking or baking aisle. Citric acid is a common substitute but is sharper and less "grape-like"; use tartaric if you can find it.
- QuantitiesThe recipe scales down cleanly: halve or quarter everything, keeping the acid-to-fruit ratio.
- "Dissolved sugar"Probably means the sugar is dissolved into the juice itself rather than into additional water, though the recipe does not say. A pound and a half per pint makes a very heavy syrup, so warm the juice gently and stir until no grains remain on the bottom — do not boil, which dulls the fresh raspberry flavour.
- The fermentation noteWild yeasts on the fruit will often start working before the sugar is fully in. The instruction to delay corking is a pressure precaution: a sealed bottle of actively fermenting syrup can burst. Leave it loosely covered until bubbling stops entirely.
- Keeping itThe sugar and acid together do most of the preserving work, but the bottles were unpasteurised and would have been kept somewhere cool. Refrigerate the finished syrup and discard any bottle that grows mould or smells yeasty rather than fruity.
- ServingTwo tablespoons of syrup to a tall glass of cold water or soda water is about right; adjust to taste. It also works over ice cream, or stirred into a gin or whisky sour in place of simple syrup and lemon.
"Raspberry acid" belongs to a family of nineteenth-century acid-set fruit cordials that stood in for lemonade where citrus was an expensive import but summer berries were abundant. Tartaric acid, a by-product of winemaking, became cheaper and more widely available over the nineteenth century and turned up in domestic cookery in baking powders, in "lemonade powders," and in cooling drinks like this one. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, which is why recipes in it carry signatures such as "Mrs. G."