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Raspberry Shrub
4 quarts raspberries 1 pint pear vinegar Sugar Pick over the raspberries, cover one half with the vinegar and let stand twenty-four hours. Strain through cheese-cloth. Pour the liquor over the remaining raspberries, and let it stand twenty-four hours. Again strain through cheese-cloth. To each cup of juice, add one-half pound of sugar. Heat gradually until the sugar is dissolved; then boil fifteen minutes. Bottle and cork. If too strong dilute with water.
A vinegar-based fruit syrup, meant to be diluted at the glass rather than drunk straight. The instructions are sound; the ambiguities are the vinegar, the sugar ratio and the keeping.
- The hinge: strain, do not pressLet the macerated fruit drip through the cheesecloth of its own accord. Squeezing or twisting the bag forces pulp and pectin through and gives a cloudy syrup that will not settle clear.
- Pear vinegarA fruit vinegar made from pears, likely milder and fruitier than distilled vinegar. Cider vinegar or a white wine vinegar at 5 percent acidity stands in for it directly; skip anything harsh or distilled, since the vinegar is a flavour here and not just an acid.
- Sugar by weightHalf a pound of sugar per cup of juice is roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar, and it makes a genuinely thick, sweet syrup. Weigh it if you can, and understand that this is a cordial to be cut with water, not a drink.
- The two 24-hour steepsThe recipe specifies no temperature. Cover the bowl and put it in the refrigerator; the vinegar suppresses spoilage organisms but not surface mould or wild yeast over two full days in a warm kitchen.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingThat reduces and thickens noticeably and dulls the fresh raspberry note. If you prefer a brighter syrup, heat only until the sugar dissolves and hold it at a bare boil for 3 to 5 minutes; the shorter cook keeps more colour and aroma but gives a thinner result.
- Bottling and "cork"Pour boiling hot into clean, hot bottles and cap with screw tops rather than driven corks. This is not a processed preserve, so treat it as a refrigerator syrup: it will keep for months chilled, and any sign of fermentation or gas means discard it.
- Yield and servingFour quarts of raspberries is roughly 4 to 5 lb and yields something in the region of a quart of finished syrup, depending on how far you boil it. Use 1 to 2 tablespoons per tall glass of cold or sparkling water.
Shrub reaches English through the Arabic sharāb, simply "a drink," and by the eighteenth century meant a sweetened fruit concentrate, sometimes spiked with rum or brandy, sometimes soured with vinegar as here. The vinegar version was the practical one for a household without ice: acid and heavy sugar together preserve the fruit's flavour through a summer, and a spoonful in water made a cooling drink for field hands and invalids alike. The call for pear vinegar is a small window on the same economy: fruit vinegars were sometimes made at home from bruised and surplus fruit, though vinegar was also widely bought.