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Raspberry Shrub
Two ounces raspberry vinegar, 1 tablespoonful sugar, fill 8-ounce glass with coarse stream.
A soda fountain formula, written in the shorthand a dispenser would read behind the counter. Everything hinges on what "raspberry vinegar" meant to the trade and on how the carbonated water goes in.
- Raspberry vinegar is a syrup, not a salad vinegarIn fountain practice this is raspberry shrub concentrate: fruit steeped in vinegar, strained, and boiled with a heavy weight of sugar. A bottle of modern raspberry wine vinegar substituted straight will produce something sharply undrinkable. Use a sweetened shrub syrup, homemade or bought.
- Coarse streamFountain taps had a fine stream (a narrow high-pressure jet, for whipping and mixing) and a coarse stream (a broad, gentler flow that preserves carbonation). Coarse here means fill quietly so the drink stays lively; at home, pour chilled soda water down the side of the glass.
- The 8-ounce glassTwo ounces of syrup and about six ounces of soda water, which is roughly a 1:3 ratio. Modern glasses run larger, so scale by proportion rather than filling a 16-ounce tumbler with the same 2 ounces.
- The tablespoonful of sugarThe recipe specifies only "sugar"; a fountain would likely have had a fine granulated grade to hand, which dissolves in cold liquid. Ordinary granulated sugar will sit at the bottom, so dissolve it in the syrup first, or substitute simple syrup and cut back the soda accordingly -- allowing about half again the volume, since 1:1 syrup is half water.
- IceThe recipe calls for no ice, and fountain soda water was drawn cold. Chill both components rather than adding cubes, which will dilute the drink as they melt.
- Stir once, gentlyGive it a single pass with a long spoon to bring the syrup up off the bottom. Vigorous stirring drives off the gas that is the point of the drink.
- YieldOne glass, about 8 ounces. Multiply freely; the syrup keeps for months refrigerated.
Shrub belongs to the long tradition of drinking vinegars — fruit preserved in vinegar and sugar, a method of keeping summer raspberries usable through the year that predates reliable home canning. The name comes through English usage from Arabic sharāb, drink, the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup. By the time this book was written the shrub had migrated from the farmhouse cellar to the marble counter, where the vinegar's acidity did useful work: it cut the sweetness of the syrup and gave the carbonated water something to push against, much as lemon or phosphate did in other fountain drinks. Its appearance in a dispenser's manual, reduced to two ounces and a tablespoonful, shows how thoroughly an old preserving recipe had been absorbed into a commercial trade run on standard glasses and measured pumps.