Home › Strawberry and Raspberry › Black Raspberry Shrub
Black Raspberry Shrub
Pour one quart of the best cider vinegar over four quarts of black raspberries. Cover and let stand for thirty-six hours. Drain through a jelly bag, getting all the juice possible. Two every pint of juice add one pound of sugar. Boil for five minutes, pour into sterilized jars, and seal. Two tablespoonfuls of juice to a glass of cold water makes a delicious drink.
A drinking vinegar of the plainest kind: fruit steeped in vinegar, strained, sweetened and boiled down to a syrup. The only real variables are the strength of your vinegar and how long the fruit sits.
- The typo"Two every pint of juice add one pound of sugar" is a misprint for "To every pint." The ratio is one pound of sugar (about 2¼ cups) per pint of strained juice.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of black raspberries is roughly 5 lb; frozen berries work perfectly well and release juice more freely after thawing. Expect to strain out somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 pints of liquid, giving perhaps 3 to 4 pints of finished syrup.
- Which vinegarAny standard cider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is right. Avoid anything labelled "reduced acidity" — the acid is what preserves the fruit during the long steep.
- The 36-hour steepCover with a plate or cloth, not an airtight lid, and keep the crock somewhere cool. A warm summer kitchen for a day and a half may start fermentation in the sugars; the refrigerator is the safer choice and costs nothing in flavour.
- StrainingA jelly bag, doubled cheesecloth in a sieve, or a clean pillowcase all work. The recipe says to get all the juice possible, so squeeze — clarity matters less here than in jelly, and the syrup will be opaque garnet regardless.
- The boilFive minutes at a full rolling boil, skimming the foam that rises. Longer thickens it toward a jam and dulls the fresh raspberry note that is the whole point.
- SealingPouring boiling syrup into sterilised jars and sealing — open-kettle canning — was standard practice then and is no longer recommended, since the lid seal is not reliably sterile. The syrup is very high in acid and sugar, so refrigerating it is straightforward and it will keep for months; if you want it shelf-stable, process filled jars in a boiling water bath by a current tested method.
- ServingTwo tablespoons to a tall glass of cold water is a good starting point; adjust to taste, as the sharpness varies with your vinegar. It is equally good topped with soda water, and the syrup keeps its own over ice with a spoonful of it poured across shaved ice.
A shrub is fruit, sugar and vinegar — the name comes through English from the Arabic sharāb, "a drink," the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup. Vinegar-and-fruit cordials were a practical way of holding a soft-fruit harvest through the year before home refrigeration, and black raspberries, which ripen fast and keep badly, were an obvious candidate. That this one appears in On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon places it precisely: the book belongs to the run of American temperance and early Prohibition drink collections that set out to prove a household could entertain without spirits. The genre leaned hard on shrubs, switchels and fruit syrups because they gave a cold drink something the era prized — a bite on the tongue, and the look of something more serious than lemonade in the glass.