Home › Beverages › Raspberry Shrub
Raspberry Shrub
Put the raspberries into a stone vessel and mash them to a pulp. Add cider vinegar enough to cover it well. It must be the pure cider vinegar, as manufactured vinegar will not do at all. Stand in the sun for an entire day and all night in the cellar. Stir up well occasionally during the day, and after you have set it in the cellar. Strain off the liquor the next day and empty out the berries; put as many fresh berries in as you used the day before, and mash them as you did the others; then pour the strained vinegar over them; then set again in the sun all day and in the cellar at night, and strain a second time in the morning. To every quart of the juice thus obtained, allow one pint of water and five pounds of sugar. Only the best grade of fine granulated sugar should be used. Place the mixture of liquid and sugar over a gentle fire and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Heat slowly to boiling, skim well, taking off every particle that arises to the surface, and as soon as it fairly boils, take off and strain. Bottle while warm and seal the corks with sealing wax.
A drinking vinegar syrup, diluted to taste with cold water. The method is sound but the vessel, the sun-and-cellar cycle and the sugar quantity all need translating.
- Use glass or glazed stoneware"A stone vessel" means glazed earthenware or stoneware. Any non-reactive container will do: glass, stoneware, or a food-grade plastic tub. Never aluminium, copper or bare cast iron, since the vinegar will pull metal into the juice.
- Cider vinegar means 5 per cent acidityCider vinegar, and check the acidity -- the recipe insists on "pure cider vinegar" but does not say why; period objections to "manufactured" vinegar covered both flavour and adulteration or uncertain strength. Use a cider vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity, the modern standard, which helps keep the steeping fruit acidic while it stands.
- Skip the sunSun and cellar were simply warm days and cool nights. Steep the mashed berries in vinegar in a covered container on the counter for 24 hours, stirring a few times, then strain. The second batch of fresh berries, an equal quantity to the first, deepens the fruit flavour and is worth doing.
- The sugar figure is very highFive pounds of sugar to a quart of juice plus a pint of water is about eleven cups of sugar to six cups of liquid, a very heavy syrup approaching the limit of what cool water will hold. Many period shrub recipes use nearer one to one and a half pounds per pint of juice. Expect a thick, near-candied syrup and be prepared for it to crystallize in the bottle; about a pound of sugar per pint of juice gives a syrup that pours.
- Boil briefly, then stopHeat gently until the sugar dissolves before it reaches a boil, skim the scum, and pull it off the heat the moment it boils properly. Extended boiling drives off the raspberry aroma and darkens the syrup toward the flavour of cooked jam.
- Sealing wax is not a modern sealWax over a cork slows evaporation but does not make a sterile closure. Bottle hot into clean screw-top glass and refrigerate once opened; a syrup this sweet and acidic keeps for months cold, and refrigeration also discourages surface mould.
- Yield and servingA quart of juice with the water and sugar gives roughly three quarts of finished syrup. Serve one to two tablespoons in a tall glass of cold or sparkling water; it is also good over shaved ice or in a whiskey sour in place of lemon.
"Shrub" comes through English from the Arabic sharāb, meaning simply a drink, and the same root gives us sherbet and syrup. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American households the word covered two related things: a spirit-based cordial with citrus, and this vinegar-and-fruit syrup, which was one of the standard ways of holding a soft-fruit crop that would otherwise be gone in a week. The vinegar is not there as a flavour affectation but as a preservative, drawing colour and juice from the berries while keeping the pH low enough for the pulp to stand overnight. The double steeping with a second batch of fresh berries, and the insistence on cider rather than "manufactured" vinegar, both point to a cook writing for readers who had their own fruit and expected to taste it.