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Vinaigre Framboise
The various fruit vinegars used extensively for sauces and beverages in Europe are but little enquired for in the United States, but probably need only to be better known to be appreciated. The native wild raspberry of the Rocky Mountains, with its peculiar aromatic flavor and bright scarlet color and juice doubtless contains new possibilities in relishes and confections, and could be cultivated to an unlimited extent among its native barrens. During is short season in the towns about which it grows it has no rival among fruits and brings a higher price than any other.
To make raspberry vinegar, half fill a stone jar with ripe raspberries of any kind, and pour in pure cider vinegar enough to a little more than cover them. Let stand in a warm place twenty-four hours. Mash the berries in the jar; strain and press through a cloth and then run the liquor through the flannel jelly bag. To each pint allow a pound of sugar if for present use or two pounds if to be bottled. Boil and skim and it is ready for use when made cold. It can be kept in preserving jars or cans a long time, put up in the usual manner, or in stone jugs, sealed while hot and painted outside to exclude air. "Mio amico, why do you, residing in the Boulevard des Italiens, Pays Culinaire, yet writing French, call that sambaoine which the French call sabayon, even when writing French?" "Only because the French themselves call the same thing by two different names. The sauce or hot spirituous beverage is of Italian origin, and has come down from the time when Italian cookery was in the ascendent, but the Italian spelling is sambaojne, the j being pronounced like i." Then I asked my meal-colored German elf what in his country they know about sabayon. He answered: "Why that is dreifutz;--only"--he adds, "when made slightly different with wine it is schatto."
Then I asked the great Columbian oracie and he, smilingly answered, 'why that is scarcely different from Thomas and Jeremiah,--only we do not cook our tom-and-jerry quite so much as you cooks do."
Then I went to an expert Englishman and asked him--"Say, Johnny! what is that sauce you make for plum pudding when you don't have the common brandy sauce?" "That," says he, "is German Custard Sauce," "What is its French name?" "Sabayon."
Enough said. They are distinctions without much difference. The confusion comes from the same compound being mentioned in a Babel of many tongues. If an intelligent person but learn the base he can build up as many variations as he please, himself.
The base may be learned by boiling a quart of Rhine wine, throwing in sugar enough to pleasantly sweeten, and a little spice; then stirring in enough beaten yolks to thicken it to a custard-like consistency--about 10 yolks to a quart--and taking of before it quite boils. Mulled wine, a hot beverage, is an elaboration of this, having the whites of the eggs beaten to a froth and stirred into the nearly boiling mixture the minute before serving.
Two things are going on here: a raspberry drinking vinegar (a shrub, in American terms) and, after a page of shop-floor banter about names, a working formula for sabayon. Both are usable; the storage instructions for the first are the part that needs rethinking.
- The hinge: sugar ratio decides shelf lifeA pound of sugar per pint is for a syrup you will drink within days, kept cold. Two pounds per pint is the preserving ratio, and at that concentration the syrup is thick and keeps far better. Choose one before you start; you cannot easily correct it later without re-boiling.
- VesselsA stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock — any nonreactive container will do, glass or food-grade plastic, never bare aluminium or copper with vinegar. A flannel jelly bag is a fine straining cloth; a double layer of butter muslin or a coffee filter gives the same clear result.
- Quantities, since none are givenA workable batch: 1 lb raspberries, about 2 cups cider vinegar to cover, which yields roughly a pint of strained liquor and therefore 1 to 2 lb sugar. Expect a little under a quart of finished syrup from that, enough for a dozen or more glasses diluted with cold or sparkling water.
- Cider vinegarUse one labelled 5 percent acidity. The acidity is what limits spoilage during the twenty-four hours of steeping and what helps the finished syrup keep.
- "A warm place" for twenty-four hoursIn period usage this could mean anywhere from a warm room to a spot near the stove; a warm room is enough here, and there is no need for a warming oven. A longer, cooler steep — up to three days in the refrigerator — extracts colour and flavour, with the vinegar doing the preserving.
- Do not seal it in painted jugsSealing stoneware while hot and painting the outside to exclude air was a real practice and a poor one. Pour the boiling syrup into sterilised glass bottles, cap, and refrigerate; the high-sugar version will hold for months, the low-sugar one for a few weeks.
- Rocky Mountain raspberryThe wild scarlet berry praised here is most likely the American red raspberry, Rubus idaeus subsp. strigosus, though the description is too general to identify with certainty. Cultivated raspberries work perfectly well, and the author says as much — "ripe raspberries of any kind."
- The sabayon baseA quart of Rhine wine means a dry to off-dry Riesling-style white. Ten yolks per quart is right for a pourable sauce. Once the yolks are in, keep the mixture off the boil and stir constantly; "taking off before it quite boils" is the whole instruction — past that the yolks scramble and no amount of whisking recovers them.
- The whites in the mulled versionBeaten whites folded into a nearly boiling mixture at the last moment will not be fully cooked through. If that matters for who is drinking it, use pasteurised whites, or leave them out and serve the sauce as it stands.
Fruit vinegars of this kind are old and widespread — the sugar-and-vinegar fruit syrup that English cooks called a shrub, a name generally traced to the Arabic sharāb, drink, and that American households made from raspberries, blackberries and currants through the nineteenth century. Raspberry vinegar in particular was a fixture of the temperance table and the sickroom, diluted with cold water as a summer drink and taken hot for a sore throat, which is part of why a cookery text bothers with it at all. The author's aside about the wild Rocky Mountain berry belongs to a period when Western fruit was still being catalogued as a commercial prospect rather than a crop. The second half of the entry is a different kind of period document: a professional kitchen argument about whether sabayon, zabaione, "dreifutz" and tom-and-jerry are the same thing. They are all wine or spirits thickened with egg, and the confusion the writer describes — one preparation carried between Italian, French, German and American kitchens, picking up a name in each — is one of the ways sauce vocabulary reached the American professional cook.