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Ruby Cup
Mix one tablespoonful of raspberry vinegar and one tablespoonful of raspberry juice. Put into a glass one half full of cracked ice and add two tablespoonfuls of crushed raspberries. Fill up with soda water and serve with straws.
A single-glass soda-fountain drink from the era when druggists and hostesses alike built cold beverages over cracked ice. Almost everything hinges on what you use for the raspberry vinegar.
- Raspberry vinegar is not vinegarRaspberry vinegar is usually not just vinegar -- in this period the term generally means a sweetened raspberry shrub syrup: fruit steeped in cider or wine vinegar, strained, and cooked with a large quantity of sugar, often approaching its own weight. A modern bottle of unsweetened raspberry-infused vinegar will make the glass sour and thin, so use a shrub syrup or expect to add sugar.
- Raspberry juiceSimply pressed and strained fresh or thawed berries, unsweetened. Bottled raspberry "juice" blends today are usually apple-based and sweetened; if you use one, cut the syrup back.
- Cracked ice, not cubesCracked ice was chipped from a block, and its smaller pieces chill faster and dilute more than cubes as they melt. Coarsely crushed ice in a tall glass is the nearest equivalent; avoid fine snow-type ice, which turns it to slush.
- Soda waterPlain carbonated water, uncoloured and unsweetened. Club soda works; tonic and flavoured seltzers do not.
- YieldOne glass; the recipe does not state a glass size. The four flavouring spoonfuls scale directly if you are making several.
- Building itFollow the recipe's own order: the vinegar and juice mixed and put onto the ice, then the crushed berries, then the soda water to fill. The recipe gives no stirring instruction.
This belongs to the American soda-fountain repertoire of the early twentieth century. The base is much older: raspberry vinegar, or shrub, was a standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household preserve, a way of keeping soft summer fruit through the year by combining it with vinegar and sugar, and it was drunk diluted with cold water as a hot-weather refresher long before carbonated water was cheap. What makes this version modern for its date is the soda water and the straws, both marks of the commercial fountain trade. "Cup" was a general term for a compounded iced drink.