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Raspberry Vinegar
Raspberries Vinegar White Sugar Fill unglazed stone jar with raspberries; pour vinegar over until jar is full. Let stand nine days, stirring every day.
Strain it off and to every pint of juice add three-quarters of a pound of white sugar. Boil it as long as any scum rises, and bottle for use. A dessertspoonful of this in a glass of water, makes a refreshing drink.
This is a drinking vinegar — a shrub syrup — not a pickle, despite its place in the chapter. The method is sound; only the vessels and measures need translating.
- The jarA stone jar would not react with vinegar over nine days. Use a wide-mouth glass jar or a glazed ceramic crock instead; unglazed stoneware is porous and hard to sanitise. Never use aluminium, copper or unlined cast iron at any stage.
- Which vinegarCider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent acidity gives the best result. Distilled white vinegar works but is harsh, and balsamic or malt will bury the fruit.
- ProportionsThree-quarters of a pound of white sugar per pint of juice is roughly 1 2/3 cups granulated sugar to 2 cups strained liquid — a heavy syrup, which is what keeps the bottled result stable.
- StrainingPress the fruit through a fine sieve or jelly bag rather than squeezing hard; hard pressure pushes pulp through and the finished syrup will be cloudy and prone to settling.
- "As long as any scum rises"Expect several minutes at a steady boil, skimming as you go; the recipe's own visual test is the reliable one. Once the scum stops forming, stop boiling, or the syrup thickens and takes on a cooked, jammy note.
- BottlingFill clean, hot bottles with the syrup while it is still boiling hot and cap at once. This is a hot-fill, not a canning process, so store opened bottles in the refrigerator, where they will keep for months on the strength of the acid and sugar.
- A dessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, or about 10 ml — a modest dose. Modern taste often runs to 2 to 3 tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water.
- YieldA quart jar packed with raspberries and topped with vinegar should give something like 2 cups of strained juice, which after boiling with sugar makes roughly 2 1/2 cups of syrup — on the author's dose, around sixty glasses.
Fruit vinegars of this kind belong to the family of drinks called shrubs, a name generally traced to the Arabic sharāb, a drink, and they were standard household stock in Britain and America through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a way of holding a soft summer fruit into winter before reliable canning and long before refrigeration. Diluted raspberry vinegar was, by common account, drunk in the hayfield as a cooling drink, kept in the sickroom for fevers and sore throats, and served in temperance households where a punch was wanted without spirits. That such a drink should sit among the vinegar recipes at all reflects an older filing logic: anything preserved in vinegar went with the vinegar recipes, whether it ended up on a plate or in a glass. The tradition never quite died, and the same syrup came back into general use through late twentieth-century restaurant cooking, where it was more likely to be whisked into a vinaigrette than stirred into water.