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Raspberry Bowle
To one quart of ice cold water add five teaspoonfuls of raspberry vinegar. Turn it into a punch bowl and stir well. If raspberries are in season, a cupful of them may be added to the drink, or if they cannot be obtained, use a cupful of shredded pineapple cut into dice,
A cold summer punch that depends almost entirely on one ingredient being understood correctly. Everything else is stirring.
- "Raspberry vinegar" is a sweet syrupIn books of this period the term means a shrub: raspberries steeped in vinegar, strained, then boiled with roughly equal weight of sugar into a thick cordial. Plain raspberry-flavoured wine vinegar from a supermarket will make the bowle sour and undrinkable. Look for a bottled drinking shrub or make the syrup first.
- Adjust the strengthFive teaspoons to a quart is a very pale drink by modern taste, and old shrubs varied widely in sweetness and acidity. Start there, taste, and work up; with a modern bottled shrub you may well want two to three tablespoons per quart.
- A "bowle"Not a bowl of fruit but the German Bowle, a cold punch served from a large vessel with fruit floating in it. The name tells you the serving style: a punch bowl, a ladle, cups rather than tumblers.
- IceThe recipe says ice cold water, not ice in the drink. Chill the water and the bowl beforehand; a block or large cubes added at the last moment will keep it cold without watering the syrup down to nothing.
- The fruitWhole raspberries will soften and cloud the drink if left to stand, so add them close to serving. The diced pineapple substitute is a fair one — it holds its shape and its acidity suits the shrub.
- YieldA quart plus fruit serves four to six as punch cups. It scales directly; work in the same ratio for a larger bowl.
- Making it a wine bowleThe original is temperance-friendly as written. A German Bowle of the same era would more often be built on white wine or sparkling wine, and either can replace part of the water here without changing the proportions of syrup.
Raspberry vinegar was common in nineteenth-century American and British households: fruit steeped in vinegar and boiled with sugar keeps for months without refrigeration, and a spoonful in cold water gave a fruit drink out of season long before bottled soft drinks. It was also valued in the sickroom, and was often recommended for fevers and sore throats. The word bowle is borrowed from German, where it names a cold fruit punch made in quantity for company. That this version is alcohol-free is in keeping with many domestic manuals of the period, some of which reflected the influence of the temperance movement and offered fruit shrubs and lemonades where an earlier generation would have set out wine.