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Drink

Strawberry and Raspberry Shrub

A preserved berry syrup made by macerating strawberries and raspberries in vinegar, sweetened with sugar, boiled, and bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Strawberry and Raspberry Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Macerate the fruit

  1. Pour white vinegar over the berries to cover them.

  2. Let them stand for 48 hours.

  3. Drain the vinegar, squeezing the juice from the fruit.

  4. For strawberries, pour vinegar over a second batch of fruit for better flavor; raspberries only need one batch.

Make the syrup

  1. Measure the liquid and add 1 pound of sugar for every pint.

  2. Boil the mixture in a porcelain-lined kettle for 10 minutes.

  3. Bottle the syrup and store it in a cool place.

Serve

  1. Use 1 cup of syrup to flavor 1 quart of ice water.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Berries
Provide the fruit flavor and color that the vinegar draws out and the syrup carries.
White vinegar
Extracts flavor from the fruit and adds the sharp acidity that defines a shrub.
Sugar
Balances the vinegar's acidity and adds sweetness, and helps preserve the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup in a porcelain-lined kettle. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully and gives the syrup stability for storage. A porcelain-lined kettle is used because vinegar reacts with reactive metals such as aluminum and copper, which can taste metallic and discolor the syrup.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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