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Old-Fashioned Raspberry Shrub

A fermented raspberry vinegar drink sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,431 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Old-Fashioned Raspberry Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Steep the fruit

  1. Cover the raspberries with cider vinegar and let them stand for 24 hours.

  2. Squeeze the mixture through a cloth.

  3. Add 6 more quarts of raspberries to the liquid.

  4. Let it stand for another 24 hours.

  5. Squeeze through a cloth again.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Measure the liquid.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pint of liquid.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Bottle the shrub and store it away.

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. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

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

  3. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Black-cap raspberries
Provide the main fruit flavor and color, and most of the liquid.
Cider vinegar
Extracts the fruit's juice and adds the sharp acidity that defines the shrub.
Sugar
Sweetens and balances the vinegar's sharpness, and helps preserve the finished liquid.

The step that matters

Measure the liquid before adding sugar. The sugar is weighed per pint of liquid, so an inaccurate volume throws off the sweet-to-sour balance. Sugar also helps preserve the shrub, so the ratio affects both taste and keeping quality.

“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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