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Raspberry
it forms an excellent cooling drink. Raspberry tea, infused from the leaves, and taken cold, will stay relaxation of the bowels. Like the Strawberry, this fruit when eaten does not undergo any acetous fermentation in the stomach even of gouty subjects. The vinegar is prepared by pouring white wine vinegar repeatedly over successive quantities of the fresh, ripe berries, used immediately after being gathered, else their fine flavour, which is quickly evanescent, becomes lost. Or, the vinegar can be extemporised by diluting Raspberry jelly with hot vinegar, this making a capital preventive of scurvy at sea. Gerarde teaches that the fruit should be give to them that have "weake, and queasie stomacks." Raspberry vinegar with water makes a useful gargle for relaxed sore throat. In Russian cookery is prepared Smetanik, or Raspberry pudding. Put a pound of fresh, or bottled Raspberries, into a small pie dish, and let them stand in the oven till they are quite hot, when they must be taken out. Whip up a teacupful of good, thick, sour cream with two eggs, one tablespoonful of flour, and one spoonful of white moist sugar. When these are all well beaten together, pour the mixture over the Raspberries, and bake the pudding in a very slow oven until it is firm. It should be of a light brown colour. Sugar improves the flavour of Raspberries.
In Germany a conserve of this fruit, which has astringent effects, is prepared with two parts of sugar to one part of the fresh juice expressed from the berries. An excellent home-made wine may be brewed from the fermented juice of ripe, sound Raspberries, which is admirable against scurvy because of the potash salts, the citrates, and malates. "A diet of other wayside berries, probably accounted for the cure of those scrofulous patients who, a few generations back, travelled hundreds of miles to receive the King's touch. As many as sixty applicants sometimes crowded the antechamber of our Charles II, and might as well have waited to get in touch with an old tom cat; but in many cases the abatement of the afflictions could not be doubted, especially when the patients had come long distances; which circumstance seems to have at last opened the eyes of such health seekers, who now prefer to treat themselves to a strawberry picnic, or even a hedgerow ramble, as in schoolboy days."
RHUBARB, GARDEN. (See HERBS).
Buried in this materia-medica entry are two workable recipes: a raspberry vinegar made by repeated maceration, and Smetanik, a baked sour-cream and raspberry pudding. The pudding is the more useful of the two, and it hinges on getting the berries hot before the custard goes on.
- "A very slow oven"Roughly 250-275F. The pudding is a thin baked custard and will curdle or weep if pushed hotter. The recipe gives no time; bake until the centre barely trembles and the top is lightly browned, as the text says.
- Heat the berries first, as instructedThis is the step that makes the dish work. Cold fruit chills the custard from below, so the top sets long before the middle does. The recipe only says to heat them till quite hot; pour off any flood of juice before the cream goes on, or the custard may not set properly.
- A teacupfulVictorian teacups run 5–6 fl oz, so about 3/4 cup of cream. With two eggs and a tablespoon of flour that gives a very lean custard — deliberately so, as it is meant to brown lightly rather than stand up like a tart filling.
- "Good, thick, sour cream"Nineteenth-century sour cream was naturally soured, high-fat and spoonable. Full-fat crème fraîche is the closest match; ordinary supermarket sour cream at 18% fat also works, but avoid anything labelled light or made with gums, which will split.
- White moist sugarA damp, fine-grained refined sugar of the period. Granulated or caster sugar is a direct substitute. The "one spoonful" is unspecified — a tablespoon matches the flour measure and suits the tartness of raspberries.
- Dish and yieldA pound of raspberries fills a 9-inch pie plate or a 1.5-quart shallow baking dish in a single layer, which is what you want. It serves four, warm or at room temperature.
- The raspberry vinegarNo proportions are given. A ratio commonly given in Victorian cookery books is about a pound of berries steeped in a pint of white wine vinegar for a day or two, strained, then poured over fresh fruit and repeated two or three times. Sweeten and bottle if you want a shrub; keep it refrigerated, and use the fruit the day it is picked, as the text insists that the flavour is quickly lost.
- Ignore the medicineThe claims here — leaf tea for loose bowels, vinegar gargles, the fruit not fermenting in gouty stomachs — are period therapeutics with no standing. Raspberries are a good source of vitamin C, which is the one part of the scurvy argument that holds.
Meals Medicinal belongs to a genre that treated the larder as a dispensary, and this entry is typical: a fruit is introduced through its supposed effects on the body, with the cookery arriving almost as an aside. The pudding is given as Smetanik, from Russian smetana, soured cream he same word behind the sour-cream sauces of Russian and Polish cooking, and the dish is essentially a baked smetana custard set over fruit, of a kind found across northern and eastern Europe wherever cream soured naturally before refrigeration. The reference to Gerarde is to John Gerard's Herball of 1597, standard quarry for any writer wanting herbal authority. The closing aside about Charles II and the King's touch — the royal ceremony for scrofula, performed on a large scale in Restoration England — argues that fresh fruit and a country walk did what the monarch's hands did not.