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To Prepare the Drink
Put a spoonful of the jelly in a goblet of water, and let it stand about ten minutes; then stir it up, and fill it with pounded ice. Currants and raspberries made into "shrub," furnish a pleasant and cooling drink when mixed with ice-water. Pounded ice is also an agreeable addition to a saucer of strawberries, raspberries or currants. Pound it until it is almost as fine as snow, and spread it over the berries. With fruit it is also an excellent substitute for cream. VIII. Summer Drinks.
A fragment of the summer-drinks chapter that assumes you already have a jar of fruit jelly or a bottle of shrub on the shelf. Everything here hangs on two things the original takes for granted: what "shrub" meant in 1900, and how finely the ice was broken.
- "The jelly"The definite article suggests this follows a preceding jelly recipe; the surrounding text mentions currants and raspberries, so a set fruit jelly rather than a gelatine dessert or a jam is the likely sense. Any tart, firm fruit jelly works. The book does not say how large a spoonful is meant.
- A gobletProbably something in the range of a tumbler or wine goblet; the book does not say. One spoonful of jelly to that volume gives a lightly flavoured drink; taste and add more, since modern commercial jellies vary widely in sugar and pectin.
- The ten minutesProbably a soaking period rather than idle waiting: firm jelly dispersed poorly in cold water if stirred straight away. Let it soften first, then stir it up as directed.
- ShrubIn nineteenth-century American household books a fruit shrub is commonly fruit steeped with sugar and vinegar, sometimes with brandy or rum, reduced and bottled; the word also covered spirit-based citrus cordials. Either way it is a concentrate rather than a drink, which is why the text has it "mixed with ice-water" — dilute to taste.
- Pounded iceIce of this period generally came as a sawn block and had to be broken up by hand, typically in a cloth or canvas bag. A Lewis bag and rolling pin is the nearest modern equivalent; a blender pulsed briefly is close enough. "Almost as fine as snow" is the target the text sets — coarse chips sit on the berries and water them down instead of frosting them.
- Ice over berriesServe immediately; finely pounded ice on strawberries or currants melts very quickly. The text does say that with fruit the ice is "an excellent substitute for cream".
- YieldEach set of directions makes a single glass or a single saucer of fruit. Scale by the serving.
This sits at the tail of a chapter written for households that had only lately been able to count on ice in July. Commercial ice harvesting from northern lakes, generally traced to the New England trade of the early nineteenth century, put sawn blocks in city iceboxes by the 1850s, and in time a domestic cookbook could assume a reader would have a piece to pound. Shrub is older still: fruit preserved in sugar and vinegar was a way of keeping the flavour of currants and raspberries long past their short season, and the name comes through English usage from the Arabic sharāb, drink. The suggestion that pounded ice replaces cream on berries reads as a period economy.