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Hot Lime and Raspberry
Mix one tablespoonful each of raspberry vinegar, raspberry juice, and lime juice. Stir well and add hot water.
A three-ingredient hot drink from the era of alcohol-free bar books, closer to a hot toddy in shape than to tea. The whole thing hinges on what "raspberry vinegar" meant in 1914.
- Raspberry vinegar is not vinegarRaspberry vinegar here is not a salad vinegar -- In books of this period the term usually means a sweetened raspberry shrub syrup: fruit steeped in cider or wine vinegar, strained, and boiled with sugar. A bottled shrub or drinking vinegar is the closer substitute; a tablespoon of plain raspberry-flavoured salad vinegar will give a far sharper, unsweetened cup.
- Raspberry juiceUnsweetened pressed raspberry juice, or thawed and strained frozen raspberries. Products sold as raspberry "juice cocktail" are often blended with cheaper juice and sugar, which shifts the balance toward sweet and away from fruit.
- Quantity and yieldThree tablespoons of flavouring is a single serving. Add 6 to 8 oz of hot water; less if you want it sharp, more if the shrub you are using is heavily sugared.
- Water temperatureJust off the boil is enough. Very hot water dulls fresh raspberry aroma and carries more of the vinegar's volatile acetic notes into the steam.
- SweeteningThe original assumes the shrub carries all the sugar. Taste before adding anything; if the drink is thin rather than sour, a teaspoon of sugar or honey stirred in while hot corrects it better than more shrub.
- Lime juiceFresh-squeezed. A tablespoon is roughly half a lime. Bottled lime juice has a cooked note that stands out badly in a drink with only three components.
This belongs to the American temperance drink literature, books assembled to prove that a host could entertain, and a sickroom could be supplied, without spirits — the title's "water wagon" is generally traced to the period slang for abstinence that survives in "on the wagon." The raspberry vinegar at its centre is much older than the temperance movement: fruit shrubs, made by steeping berries in vinegar and preserving the strained liquid with sugar, were a standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century way to keep summer fruit through the winter, and the resulting syrup was, by most accounts, drunk cold with water in hot weather and hot with water for colds and sore throats. Hot lime and raspberry sits squarely in that second use.