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Raspberry Vinegar
Mrs. W. S. Walker.
To four quarts red raspberries, put enough vinegar to cover, and let them stand twenty four hours; scald and strain it; add a pound of sugar to one pint of juice; boil it twenty minutes, and bottle; it is then ready for use and will keep years. To one glass of water add a great spoonful. It is much relished by the sick. Very nice.
This is a drinking vinegar — a shrub syrup — diluted into water as a cooling drink. The method is sound, and the only real decisions are the vinegar you start with and the vessel you steep in.
- The hinge: use a non-reactive pan and crockRaspberries plus vinegar is aggressively acidic and will pick up metal from aluminum, copper, or cast iron, turning the syrup grey and metallic. Steep in glass, glazed ceramic, or stainless, and boil in stainless or enamel.
- Which vinegarCider vinegar at 5 percent acidity is the closest match to what a nineteenth-century kitchen had on hand and gives the roundest flavour; white wine vinegar is cleaner and lighter. Avoid distilled white, which is harsh, and avoid anything labelled below 5 percent, since the acid is what preserves the finished syrup.
- QuantitiesFour quarts of raspberries is roughly 5 to 6 lb, or about eight of the 12 oz supermarket punnets. Expect the vinegar needed to "cover" them to be somewhere around 1 to 1.5 quarts depending on how you pack the fruit.
- "Scald and strain"Bring the steeped fruit and vinegar just to a simmer to loosen the juice, then strain. Pour through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth and let it drip rather than squeezing, or the syrup will be cloudy.
- Sugar ratio and the twenty-minute boilA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups juice — a heavy syrup, which is what makes the keeping quality. Twenty minutes at a steady boil reduces it and dissolves the sugar fully; skim the foam that rises.
- "A great spoonful"A generous, heaped tablespoon, stirred into a glass of cold water. Modern taste often prefers a little less — start with two teaspoons in 8 oz and adjust.
- Bottling and keepingBottle hot into clean, hot glass bottles and cap. "Will keep years" was true of a cool dark cellar; in a modern kitchen store unopened bottles somewhere cool and dark, and refrigerate once opened. Discard any bottle that ferments, gasses, or shows mould at the neck.
Raspberry vinegar belongs to the family of drinks the English called shrubs, from the Arabic sharāb, meaning simply a drink: fruit, sugar, and an acid, kept as a concentrate and let down with water. Before commercial soft drinks, this was how a household preserved a summer glut of soft fruit in a form that could be poured out in January, and the acidity made it seem medicinal as well as pleasant — hence Mrs. Walker's note that "it is much relished by the sick," the sort of remark that recurs in nineteenth-century receipt books for anything cooling and easily swallowed by an invalid. Raspberry vinegar was commonly recommended for fevers and sore throats in this period, and recipes for it turn up frequently in North American community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, usually with the same structure: steep, strain, weigh in sugar, boil, bottle. Its return to fashion came from two directions in the late twentieth century, as a salad dressing during the nouvelle cuisine years and then, more faithfully to this recipe, through the revival of shrubs behind cocktail bars.