Raspberry Liqueur
INGREDIENTS for 2 quarts.-1 quart of gin, 1 pint of raspberries, 1 lb. of loaf sugar, 1½ pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 3d.
Put the gin with the fruit in a bottle, which cork closely. Let it stand a fortnight, RASPBERRY VINEGAR. then boil the sugar and water, and when cold, filter and pour to the gin and fruit.
Filter through blotting-paper, and put up in small well-corked bottles.
SEASONABLE. - Make in July.
A steeped cordial rather than a distilled one: gin does all the extraction work, and a sugar syrup is added afterwards. The only real technique is patience and clean filtering.
- Imperial measuresBeeton's quart is 40 fl oz and her pint 20 fl oz, so the gin is about 1.2 US quarts and the water about 1.8 US pints — roughly 1.15 litres gin, some 300 g raspberries, 450 g sugar and 850 ml water. Working in metric avoids the imperial/US pint trap entirely.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was highly refined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated is the direct equivalent; it dissolves faster, so the syrup needs only a minute or two at a simmer.
- Which ginUse an unsweetened London dry at 40% ABV. Old Tom and other sweetened gins will push the finished liqueur cloying once the full pound of sugar goes in.
- The steepA fortnight is generous for raspberries, which give up colour and flavour within four or five days. Longer steeping mainly extracts seed and pulp character and makes the later filtering harder. Keep the jar out of direct light or the colour browns.
- Cool the syrup fullyThe instruction to add it cold is the hinge. Syrup added warm will dull the fresh raspberry aroma the steep was for, and there is nothing to gain by hurrying it.
- FilteringBlotting-paper was the Victorian laboratory filter. Strain first through muslin or a fine sieve to remove fruit, then pass the liquid through a coffee filter — expect it to be slow, and change the paper when it clogs. Pectin haze may persist; it is cosmetic.
- Yield and strengthThe stated two quarts is about 2.3 litres, which puts it at roughly 20% ABV, comparable to a modern fruit liqueur. Bottle full to the neck, cork or cap tightly, and it will keep a year or more; the colour fades before the flavour does.
- SeasonJuly is specified because that is when English raspberries crop. Good frozen raspberries work well and, having been ruptured by freezing, release their juice faster.
Fruit-steeped spirits of this kind sit in a long English household tradition of ratafias, shrubs and cordials — ways of holding a short summer fruit season in a bottle before reliable preserving. Gin was a cheap and widely used base spirit in nineteenth-century Britain, as brandy was in wealthier or more southerly kitchens, and the method here is essentially the same one behind sloe gin: macerate, sweeten, filter, keep. The mention of blotting-paper is a period detail worth noticing; Victorian domestic manuals borrowed freely from the chemist's bench. The costing in shillings and pence, and the "seasonable" note, are hallmarks of Beeton's editorial method — entries of this kind were meant to be budgeted and timed, not merely cooked.