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Raspberry Shrub
Pour a quart of vinegar over four quarts of mashed red raspberries. Let stand twenty-four hours. Then strain. Allow one pound of sugar to every pint of juice. Boil twenty minutes. Skim, and seal in sterilized jars. Keep in a cool place. Use two tablespoonfuls to a glass of water when serving.
A drinking vinegar syrup: fruit steeped in vinegar, strained, then cooked with sugar to a shelf-stable concentrate. Little here needs translating, but a few details decide whether it keeps.
- The vinegarUse a standard 5% acidity cider or white wine vinegar. Both the acid and the very heavy sugar load are doing the preserving here; a low-acid or homemade vinegar of unknown strength is the one substitution to avoid.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of raspberries is roughly 6 lb, or about eight 12-oz clamshells. Expect somewhere near 2 quarts of strained liquid, so about 4 lb of sugar and perhaps 2 1/2 quarts of finished syrup.
- The steepingMash the fruit in a glass, stainless or glazed bowl, never aluminum or bare cast iron, which react with vinegar. Cover and leave at cool room temperature or in the refrigerator for the full twenty-four hours.
- StrainingDrip through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth without squeezing if you want a clear shrub. Pressing the pulp gives more yield and a cloudier syrup that will throw sediment in the jar.
- "Boil twenty minutes"Stir until the sugar dissolves before it reaches a boil, then keep it at a steady simmer rather than a hard rolling boil. Twenty minutes is for thickening and skimming, not for setting a gel, so there is no need to test for sheeting.
- SealingPour boiling hot into hot sterilized jars and seal at once. For a syrup you intend to keep at room temperature, process the filled jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; otherwise treat the "cool place" as the refrigerator.
- ServingTwo tablespoons to a tumbler of cold water, still or sparkling, over ice. It is also good over shaved ice, or a spoonful into a glass of soda water with a little lemon.
Shrub in this sense comes from the Arabic sharāb, simply "a drink," and reached English kitchens by way of eighteenth-century punch-making, when the word covered both fruit-and-vinegar syrups and fruit steeped in rum or brandy. The vinegar version was a farm preserve as much as a beverage: it used up a glut of soft summer fruit that would not survive the week, and the resulting syrup kept in the cellar for months. Recipes like this one appear steadily in nineteenth-century American cookbooks and household manuals, alongside the other temperance standbys of the period — switchels, lemonades, ginger beers, fruit vinegars.