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Raspberry Vinegar (II)
Mrs. Joseph B. Leake.
Fill a jar with red raspberries picked from the stalks. Pour in as much vinegar as it will hold. Let it stand ten days, then strain it through a sieve. Don't press the berries, just let the juice run through. To every pint add one pound loaf sugar. Boil it like other syrup; skim, and bottle when cold.
A raspberry shrub syrup, meant to be diluted with cold water as a summer drink or spooned over ice. The method is sound; only the units and the vessel need translation.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken or grated as needed. Plain granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent — one pound is about 2 1/4 cups.
- A pint of whatThe pound of sugar goes to every pint of strained liquid, not of berries. Measure after straining; a pound to a pint gives a dense syrup that keeps well and wants diluting at the glass.
- Use glass or stainlessTen days of vinegar will pit aluminium, copper and cast iron and pick up a metallic taste. A wide glass jar with a plastic or plastic-lined lid is what the original "jar" was reaching for.
- The vinegarCider or white wine vinegar at the usual 5 percent acidity suits raspberries. The acid is what makes the ten-day room-temperature steep safe; do not substitute a diluted or low-acid vinegar.
- Don't press the berriesThis is the hinge. Pressing forces pulp and fine sediment through, and the finished syrup turns cloudy and never settles clear. Let it drip, unhurried, and discard the spent fruit.
- Boil it like other syrupBring to a boil and hold at a gentle simmer for a few minutes, skimming the foam that rises. Prolonged boiling dulls the fruit flavour; the sugar concentration, not long cooking, does the preserving.
- Bottling and keepingCooling before bottling would have spared the glass; with modern bottles you may fill warm. Refrigerate after opening — it will keep months cold, and the flavour fades before it spoils.
- Yield and servingRoughly a quart of berries and a pint of vinegar gives about a pint and a half of syrup. Figure one to two tablespoons per tall glass of cold or sparkling water.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of drinks called shrubs, from the Arabic sharāb, meaning simply a drink; fruit steeped in vinegar and sweetened was a standard way of holding a summer crop through the year before home canning was general. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks print it among the sickroom remedies as well as among the beverages — it was given diluted to fever patients as a cooling drink, and the same bottle served the harvest field and the parlour. The Home Cook Book, compiled in the 1870s from contributions by Chicago women and sold for charity, carries a second version of it under the same name, which is a fair sign of how many households kept their own; the attribution to Mrs. Joseph B. Leake is the book's usual practice of crediting each donor by her husband's name. That the compilers found room for more than one version suggests they were recording what women actually made rather than editing toward a single authority.