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Raspberry Acid
Mrs. G. W. Pitkin.
Dissolve five ounces of tartaric acid in two quarts of water; pour it upon twelve pounds of red raspberries in a large bowl; let it stand twenty four hours; strain it without pressing; to a pint of this liquor add one and ahalf pounds of white sugar; stir until dissolved. Bottle, but do not cook for several days, when it is ready for use. Two or three tablespoons in a glass of ice water will make a delicious beverage.
A raspberry syrup concentrate of the old "acid" or shrub type, made cold and diluted at the table. Nothing is cooked, so the whole thing depends on the acid and the very high sugar concentration doing the preserving.
- "Do not cook" is a misprint for "do not cork""Do not cook" is almost certainly a misprint for "do not cork" -- the printed instruction makes no sense in a recipe with no cooking in it, and other printings of this type of recipe read "bottle, but do not cork for several days." Read that way, the syrup is bottled but left uncorked while it settles. Sealing it tight straight away traps the gas from any stray fermentation and can burst the bottle. Cover loosely with cloth or a lid set on but not screwed down until it has stopped working.
- Tartaric acidBuy food-grade tartaric acid, sold for winemaking and confectionery; it is not the same as cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate), which is far weaker and will not do the job. Five ounces is about 140 g, dissolved in two quarts (1.9 L) of water.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of raspberries is roughly 5.5 kg, a serious quantity even at the height of the season. The proportions hold at any size: about 1 lb of berries per 5-6 fl oz of acid water, then 1.5 lb sugar per pint of strained juice.
- Strain without pressingThis is the one instruction that decides how the syrup looks. Let it drip through a jelly bag or a doubled cloth under its own weight; squeezing pushes pulp and pectin through and gives a cloudy, hazy bottle that never clears.
- The sugar ratio is enormousOne and a half pounds (about 680 g) to a pint (475 ml) gives a syrup of roughly 60 per cent sugar by weight, a very high concentration and the main thing, with the acid, that keeps it from spoiling. It dissolves slowly in cold juice, so stir over several hours rather than assuming it has failed. Do not cut the sugar back.
- The twenty-four hour steepThe berries sit at room temperature in heavily acidified water, and the low pH is presumably what allowed a room-temperature steep of this length. In a warm kitchen, cover the bowl and put it somewhere cool; a modern refrigerator steep works and simply extracts a little more slowly.
- Yield and keepingTwelve pounds of berries and two quarts of water will give roughly three quarts of strained liquor and something over a gallon of finished syrup. Once it has stopped fizzing, bottle and refrigerate; discard any bottle that turns fizzy, cloudy or smells of solvent.
- ServingTwo or three tablespoons per tall glass of ice water, as written. It also takes well to soda water, and the tartness makes it a reasonable base for a sour with gin or rum.
"Acids" like this one belong to the same family as the vinegar-based shrubs: a cold fruit concentrate, sharply sour, kept by sugar and diluted into a summer cooling drink. Tartaric acid was a cheap and widely available souring agent in the nineteenth century, a byproduct of winemaking stocked by druggists alongside citric acid and cream of tartar, and it avoids the vinegar note of older shrub recipes. The Home Cook Book was first compiled in Chicago in 1874 from recipes contributed by named local women and sold in aid of a charity, which is the kind of book in which an attribution like Mrs. G. W. Pitkin's belongs; note that a closely related Toronto edition of the same title appeared later in the 1870s. A recipe calling for twelve pounds of raspberries at once suggests access to a garden or farm rather than a market basket.