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Blackberry Shrub, or Vinegar
Blackberry shrub is made precisely the same as raspberry shrub except that to the three parts of liquid, there will be required five and a half pounds of sugar instead of five. With this exception the rule is precisely the same and the mode of making exact.
This entry is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the raspberry shrub rule in front of you and only adjusts the sugar. Working from the standard method of the period, here is what the shorthand means.
- What the base method isRaspberry shrub in books of this era usually means fruit covered with vinegar and left to steep a day or two, the liquid strained off and poured over fresh fruit once or twice more, then strained clear, sweetened, boiled briefly and bottled; the type of vinegar is not always stated. Blackberries are firmer and less juicy than raspberries, so bruise them well before the vinegar goes on.
- "Three parts of liquid"This is a proportion, not a volume, and the original never says what a part is. Read it as three pints of strained blackberry-vinegar juice to 5 1/2 lb sugar and scale from there. If your measure of a part differs, keep the sugar in the same relation to the liquid.
- Why blackberries take more sugarThe book does not say why the rule calls for an extra half pound. Blackberries are more tannic and less aromatic than raspberries, which may be part of it, but the reason is not given.
- The vinegarThe book does not say what vinegar to use; plain cider vinegar of about 5 percent acidity is the usual modern choice. Wine vinegars and anything flavoured will fight the fruit, and unpasteurised vinegar with a live mother is best strained off before bottling.
- The hinge: boil the syrup, brieflyBring the sweetened juice just to a boil, skim, and take it off within a few minutes. Long boiling drives off the volatile berry aroma and leaves you with sweet vinegar; the point of a shrub is that the fruit still reads.
- Bottling and keepingBottle hot into clean, hot glass and seal. The combination of high sugar and acetic acid is what preserves it; a shrub kept in the refrigerator will hold for months. Discard any bottle that shows gas pressure, cloudiness or a yeasty smell.
- Yield and servingThree pints of juice with this much sugar gives roughly three quarts of syrup. Serve about one part syrup to six or eight parts cold water or soda water, adjusting to taste; it also works over ice with spirits.
A shrub is a fruit syrup preserved with vinegar, and the name comes through English usage from the Arabic sharab, to drink, the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup. Before reliable refrigeration, vinegar was one of the few ways to hold summer fruit in drinkable form through the year, and shrubs appear in American and British household books from the eighteenth century onward, first as a base for rum and brandy punches and later as beverages in their own right. Blackberries were the cheapest fruit imaginable in nineteenth-century America, gathered wild from hedgerows and roadsides rather than bought, which is why they turn up so often in cordials, vinegars and the blackberry syrups sold as summer stomach remedies. The terse cross-reference to raspberry shrub is characteristic of the period's compilers.