Strawberry Vinegar, of Delicious Flavour

Instructions

1. Take the stalks from the fruit, which should be of a highly flavoured sort, quite ripe, fresh from the beds, and gathered in dry weather.
2. Weigh it and put it into large glass jars or wide-necked bottles. To each pound pour about a pint and a half of fine pale white wine vinegar. Pale white wine vinegar answers better than the entirely colourless kind sold as distilled vinegar.
3. Tie a thick paper over them and let the strawberries remain from three to four days.
4. Pour off the vinegar and empty the fruit into a jelly-bag, or suspend it in a cloth, so that all the liquid may drop from it without pressure.
5. Replace the fruit with an equal weight of fresh strawberries (4 lbs.) and pour the vinegar upon it. Three days afterwards repeat the same process, this time diminishing the proportion of strawberries a little (3 to 4 lbs.), since the flavour of the fruit ought ultimately to overpower that of the vinegar. Leave this last infusion 2 to 4 days.
6. Drain off the liquid very closely and strain it through a linen or flannel bag.
7. Weigh the liquid and mix with it an equal quantity of highly-refined sugar, roughly powdered - 1 lb. of sugar to each pound of the vinegar.
8. When the sugar is nearly dissolved, stir the syrup over a very clear fire until it has boiled for five minutes, and skim it thoroughly.
9. Pour it into a delicately clean stone pitcher, or into large china jugs, throw a thick folded cloth over, and let it remain until the morrow.
10. Put it into pint or half-pint bottles and cork them lightly with new velvet corks - if these are pressed in tightly at first the bottles will sometimes burst. In four or five days they may be closely corked and stored in a dry, cool place. Damp destroys the colour and injures the flavour.
11. Obs.: where there is a garden, the fruit may be thrown into the vinegar as it ripens, within an interval of forty-eight hours, instead of being all put to infuse at once; it must then remain a proportionate time, and one or two days in addition to that specified will make no difference. Enamelled stewpans are the best possible vessels to boil it in, but it may be simmered in a stone jar set into a pan of boiling water, though the syrup does not usually keep so well that way.
12. To use: a spoonful or two in a glass of water makes an agreeable summer beverage, and one acceptable to invalids. It also makes an admirable sauce for sweet light puddings.
13. Variations: raspberries and strawberries mixed make a vinegar of very pleasant flavour; black currants also afford an exceedingly useful syrup of the same kind.