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Kastberry Vinegar

A preserved raspberry syrup made with vinegar, sugar, and optional red currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Gooseberry and currant work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Kastberry Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the infusion

  1. Bruise the raspberries and pour the vinegar over them.

  2. Let it sit for 24 hours, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon.

  3. Place the sugar in an earthen vessel.

  4. Strain the fruit and vinegar through a jelly bag over the sugar, pressing gently.

Make and bottle the syrup

  1. Boil the syrup in a preserving pan just to clear it, skimming off any scum. Remove from heat.

  2. Pour the syrup into an earthen vessel and let it cool.

  3. Bottle the syrup in pint bottles.

  4. To use, mix 2 tablespoons of the syrup in a small tumbler of 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. Gooseberry + curranttop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Gooseberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Raspberries
Provide the main flavour and colour, and their juice dissolves into the vinegar during steeping.
Vinegar
Extracts the fruit flavour and provides the sharp acidity that balances the sweet syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, at high concentration, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup just to clear it. Boiling only until the syrup clears and skimming off scum keeps it clear and fresh-tasting; prolonged boiling would darken and caramelise the sugar and dull the fruit flavour.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (gooseberry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against gooseberry, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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