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Raspberry Shrub
Place red raspberries in a stone jar, cover them with good cider vinegar, let stand over night; next morning strain, and to one pint of juice add one pint of sugar, boil ten minutes, and bottle while hot.-Mrs. Judge West.
A drinking vinegar, not a soft drink to be swallowed neat: the finished product is a concentrated sweet-sour syrup that gets diluted at the glass. Two things decide whether it works — a vessel that does not react with vinegar, and a proper boil to dissolve the sugar and thicken the syrup.
- Fruit and vinegar quantitiesThe original gives no weight of berries, only "cover them." Fill the jar with berries and add enough cider vinegar to submerge them; how much that takes depends on the jar and how tightly the fruit is packed. Judge by the jar, not by a number.
- Stone jar means non-reactiveA stoneware crock was the period's answer to acid. Glass, glazed ceramic or stainless steel all work; aluminium, copper and unlined cast iron do not, and will give the syrup a metallic edge overnight.
- Cider vinegarModern bottled cider vinegar runs 5 percent acidity. Nineteenth-century home or barrel vinegar varied in strength, and the recipe says nothing about it. Unpasteurised cider vinegar with sediment is fine here; the syrup gets boiled.
- A pint of sugarMeasured by volume as the original intends, a pint of granulated sugar is about 14 oz (400 g). Equal volumes of juice and sugar is the classic shrub ratio and is what keeps the syrup thick.
- Boil ten minutesTen minutes at a steady boil is right — it dissolves the sugar fully and reduces the syrup slightly. Skim the foam that rises in the first minute or two, or the bottled shrub will be cloudy.
- Bottling while hot is not canningFilling hot bottles gives a partial seal and nothing more. Sugar and vinegar together make this keep well, but store the bottles in the refrigerator and use within a few months rather than treating them as shelf-stable preserves.
- StrainingPress the fruit through a fine sieve or jelly bag if you want maximum juice, but stop short of forcing pulp through — pulp makes the syrup murky and it will separate in the bottle.
- Yield and servingA pint of juice with a pint of sugar dissolved into it gives appreciably more than a pint of syrup -- on the order of a pint and a half, less whatever the ten-minute boil drives off. Serve 1 to 2 tablespoons in a tall glass of cold water or soda water; it also does well over ice with bourbon or rye.
- Frozen berriesFrozen raspberries work and release their juice readily as they thaw in the vinegar. Use them straight from the freezer and let the overnight steep run a full 12 hours.
"Shrub" comes into English from the Arabic sharāb, meaning a drink, and by the eighteenth century covered two rather different things: a spirituous punch base made with citrus and rum, and this thriftier vinegar-and-fruit syrup. The vinegar version was a practical answer to a glut of soft summer fruit in a house with no ice — acid and sugar together held the flavor of the berries into the following winter, and a spoonful in water made a cooling drink for the field or the sickroom. Raspberry vinegar in particular was a fixture of American household books through the nineteenth century, and it appears in The Dixie Cook Book, credited to a contributor by her husband's title in the fashion of the day. Drinking vinegars fell out of use once bottled sodas and reliable ice arrived, and returned to bar menus only in the last couple of decades.