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Raspberry Vinegar
Pour one quart of cider vinegar over two quarts of red raspberries. Cover and stand in a warm place for two days. Strain off the vinegar, pour it over one quart of fresh raspberries, and let stand as before. Strain, pour over another quart of berries, and let stand. Then strain through a jelly bag and add one pound of sugar to every pint of juice. Bring to a boil, and boil gently for five minutes. Skim, and seal in hot jars.
This is a drinking vinegar — a shrub syrup — built by steeping four separate batches of fruit in the same vinegar so the flavour compounds without diluting the acid. The layered steeping is the whole point; skipping it gives thin, sharp syrup.
- Total fruit neededThe recipe uses four quarts of raspberries in all: two quarts in the first steep, then one quart at each of two further stages. A quart of raspberries is roughly 1 1/4 lb, so budget about 5 lb of fruit for one quart of vinegar.
- Cider vinegar strengthStandard supermarket cider vinegar is around 5 percent acetic acid; period and home-made cider vinegar was not standardised and its strength varied. Do not substitute a low-acid or diluted "salad vinegar"; the acid is what keeps the fruit safe during two days at room temperature.
- "A warm place"Means a kitchen shelf or the back of the range, not a modern oven's proof setting. Somewhere at or a little above ordinary room temperature over two days. Keep it covered against fruit flies and stir once a day.
- StrainingFor the intermediate steeps a fine sieve is enough — press the fruit lightly. Save the jelly bag for the final strain and let it drip without squeezing if you want a clear syrup. Squeezing gives more yield and a cloudy result.
- Sugar ratioA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is close to a pound-for-pound syrup, roughly 2 1/4 cups of granulated sugar to each pint (2 cups) of juice. That is deliberately high: the sugar is a preservative as much as a sweetener. Reducing it substantially means treating the result as a refrigerator syrup with a few weeks' life.
- The five-minute boilBoil gently and no longer. Extended boiling drives off the volatile raspberry aroma and darkens the syrup toward jam. Skim the foam as it rises.
- Sealing"Seal in hot jars" describes open-kettle canning, once standard practice and no longer recommended. Current practice for a high-acid syrup like this is a boiling-water bath for the filled jars; consult a current canning guide for times at your altitude. Unprocessed, the syrup keeps for months in the refrigerator.
- Yield and servingExpect roughly three pints of finished syrup. Serve one to two tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water over ice — the temperance-era intent — or use it to dress a fruit salad or deglaze a pan for duck.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of shrubs, fruit syrups preserved with vinegar and sugar, whose arrival in English and American kitchens is generally traced to the seventeenth-century practice of using acid to hold fruit through the year before refrigeration. By the nineteenth century it was, by many accounts, common summer household stock in the United States, often said to be kept bottled for harvest hands and sickrooms alike; diluted with cold water it was considered both refreshing and cooling in fever. Its appearance in a temperance collection is the point of the book: On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon gathers non-alcoholic drinks for a movement that needed something more interesting than water to put in a glass, and a sharp, sweet, deeply fruity vinegar cordial did the job better than most. Shrubs are usually said to have faded from American kitchens over the course of the twentieth century, and to have returned more recently by way of cocktail bars, where the same syrup now most often goes into the drinks this book was written to replace.