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Raspberry Vinegar
To two quarts of vinegar, four quarts of raspberries, after standing twenty-four hours, drain off the vinegar and pour it over fresh berries. After this has stood the same length of time, strain and add one pound of sugar to each pint of juice, boil twenty minutes, then bottle. Three tablespoonfuls to a glass of water.
A raspberry shrub in the old sense: fruit steeped twice in vinegar, sweetened, boiled down and diluted at the glass. The proportions are sound; the main adjustments are the vessel, the vinegar and how you keep it.
- The hinge: use a non-reactive vesselTwo quarts of vinegar sitting on fruit for two days will strip aluminium, copper and unglazed iron and take on a metallic taste. Steep in glass, glazed stoneware or stainless, and cover the crock so nothing settles in it.
- What vinegar was meantHousehold vinegar of this period was usually cider vinegar, at roughly 4-5 percent acidity. Cider vinegar is the closest match; white wine vinegar gives a cleaner fruit flavour. Distilled white is harsh here, and modern "cleaning vinegar" at 6 percent or above should not be used for drinking.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts is 8 cups of vinegar; four quarts of raspberries is about 5 lb of fresh fruit, doubled if you follow the second steeping as written, so plan on 10 lb total. Frozen berries work and in fact break down faster.
- The double steepDraining the vinegar off the first batch and pouring it over fresh berries is what makes this worth the trouble - it doubles the fruit concentration without diluting the acid. Crush the berries lightly before each steep. If you halve the fruit, do a single steep and accept a paler syrup.
- StrainingStrain through a jelly bag or two layers of damp cheesecloth and let it drip rather than squeezing, or the finished syrup will be cloudy and full of sediment. Expect to lose some volume to the fruit, though how much varies.
- Sugar and the boilOne pound of sugar per pint of juice is about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 2 cups liquid - a heavy syrup, and the sugar is doing preservative work as well as sweetening. Dissolve it fully before the liquid comes to a boil, and skim the foam during the twenty minutes. Boiled hard it will thicken toward jelly; keep it at a steady low boil.
- Bottling and keepingFill clean, hot bottles while the syrup is still near boiling and cap at once. The sugar-acid combination keeps well, but this is not a tested canning procedure: store the bottles in the refrigerator, and discard any that ferment, cloud or push their caps.
- Yield and servingThe yield depends on how much juice you recover and how far the boil reduces it. Three tablespoons to a glass of water is about a 1:5 dilution; it is very good over ice with soda water, and equally at home in a whiskey sour.
Fruit vinegars of this kind were called shrubs; the word is generally traced to Arabic sharab, "drink". They belong to the same family as the cordials and sweetened waters of earlier English cookery. Before reliable refrigeration, a heavy sugar-and-vinegar syrup was one way to hold the flavour of a short raspberry season, and the acid made the resulting drink genuinely refreshing in hot weather. If the recipe sits under Beverages rather than Preserves, that placement suggests raspberry vinegar was being treated as a summer drink concentrate first and a preserve second, alongside lemonades and ginger waters.