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Strawberry Vinegar
Four pounds strawberries, three quarts vinegar. Put fresh, ripe berries in a jar, adding to each pound a pint and a half of fine, pale white-wine vinegar. Tie a thick paper over them and let them remain three or four days. Then drain off the vinegar, and pour it over four pounds fresh fruit. After three days drain-again, and add it a third time to fresh fruit. After draining the last time, add one pound refined sugar to each pint of vinegar. When nearly dissolved, stir the syrup over a fire till it has dissolved (five minutes). Skim it, pour it in a pitcher, cover it till next day. Then bottle it, and cork it loosely for the first few days. Use a few spoonfuls to a glass of water.--Mrs. E. P. G.
A drinking vinegar in the old sense: fruit steeped in vinegar three times over, then sweetened into a syrup to be diluted at the glass. Nothing here is difficult, but the arithmetic and the bottling deserve attention.
- How much fruit you actually needThe headnote says four pounds, but the method calls for a fresh four pounds at each of three steepings — twelve pounds of strawberries in total for three quarts of vinegar. The vinegar is the thing being flavored and reused; the fruit is spent each time.
- The vinegar"Fine, pale white-wine vinegar" would today mean an ordinary white wine vinegar of around 5 percent acidity; pale is presumably specified so the finished syrup keeps the color of the berries. Cider vinegar works but muddies both color and flavor. Three quarts is twelve cups.
- Use non-reactive vesselsDays of contact with vinegar will pit aluminum and leach copper. Steep in glass or glazed stoneware and cook the syrup in stainless steel or enamel.
- Steep somewhere coolThe "thick paper" tied over the jar keeps out flies and dust. A double layer of muslin under a rubber band does the same. In a warm kitchen three or four days may leave the fruit off or working; keeping the jar somewhere cool, or refrigerated, makes the extraction slower but cleaner.
- Drain, do not pressLet the fruit drip through a sieve or jelly bag of its own weight. Squeezing the pulp gives you a cloudy syrup that throws sediment in the bottle.
- The sugar ratioOne pound of sugar to one pint of vinegar is roughly 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups liquid — a true syrup, and part of the reason it keeps. Do not cut it much; the sugar is preservative as well as sweetener.
- Five minutes means five minutesOnce the sugar has dissolved, only a brief simmer is wanted; prolonged boiling cooks off the fresh strawberry aroma and leaves a flat, jammy taste. Skim the foam as it rises.
- Why the cork is looseAny residual yeast may produce a little gas in the first days, and a tightly sealed bottle can build pressure. Leave the closure loose at first, then seal and refrigerate. Kept cold, the syrup should hold for months.
- Yield and servingThe finished quantity is not stated; expect somewhere in the region of two to three quarts, depending on how much vinegar is lost in draining and how much volume the sugar adds. "A few spoonfuls to a glass of water" is about 2 tablespoons in 8 ounces, still or sparkling; it also works in a cocktail or a dressing.
Fruit vinegars of this kind belong to the family of shrubs — sweetened, acidulated concentrates diluted with water, valued in the era before reliable ice or bottled soft drinks because they kept through the summer without spoiling. Raspberry and strawberry vinegar were often said to be sickroom drinks in nineteenth-century Anglo-American households, given to fever patients for whom plain water was thought insipid, and they doubled as a hot-weather refreshment for everyone else. The repeated steeping, with the same vinegar poured over three successive batches of fresh berries, is a frugal way of building intensity without diluting the acid, and the technique appears in English cookery books well before this one. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878 by John P. Morton of Louisville, gathered contributions from named Virginia housekeepers; the initials at the end mark this as one woman's household formula rather than the editor's.