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CURRANT SHRUB
Make the same as jelly, but boil only ten minutes; when cool, bottle and cork tight, (see directions for canned fruits). Raspberry, strawberry and blackberry shrubs are made in the same way; when used, put in two-thirds ice-water.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have the currant jelly instructions in hand and only tells you where to stop. What you are making is a sweetened fruit syrup for diluting, not a preserve.
- What "make the same as jelly" meansCrush and heat the fruit, drain the juice through a jelly bag without pressing, then boil the juice with sugar; period currant jelly recipes generally call for somewhere between three-quarters of a pound and a pound of sugar per pint of juice, though this page does not repeat the figures. The only change here is that you stop at ten minutes rather than cooking on until the jelly sets.
- Ten minutes is the whole pointThe short boil is deliberate: you want a pourable syrup, not a set. Currants are high in pectin, so longer boiling risks a syrup that thickens or gels in the bottle and is harder to mix into water.
- "Shrub" here has no vinegarNineteenth-century American shrub covers both vinegar-and-fruit drinking syrups and plain sweetened fruit syrups, sometimes fortified with brandy. This one is the plain sugar-and-juice kind.
- Bottling and storageThe recipe has you let the syrup cool before bottling and corking tight, with a cross-reference to the canned-fruit directions. Sugar and the acidity of currants do most of the preserving work, but with no measured processing time this is not shelf-stable by current standards — keep bottles refrigerated and use within a few weeks, and discard anything cloudy, gassy or moldy.
- ServingTwo-thirds ice water means roughly one part syrup to two parts water. Start there and adjust; a syrup made at a full pound of sugar per pint will take more dilution than that.
- The other fruitsRaspberry, strawberry and blackberry are all lower in pectin than currants, so they give a looser syrup at the same ten minutes. Strawberry in particular loses color and flavor fast with long heat, so do not extend the boil hoping to thicken it.
Shrub reaches English by way of the Arabic sharāb, to drink, the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup, and by the eighteenth century it named a family of concentrated fruit drinks meant to be kept and let down with water. Two branches ran side by side in American households: the vinegar shrubs, where acid did the preserving, and the plain or brandied fruit syrups like this one. In Buckeye Cookery the recipe sits among the preserving matter, cross-referenced to the jelly and canned fruit instructions, and currants ripened in quantity in mid-summer Ohio dooryards. That the recipe is written as an afterthought to the jelly instructions may say something about how these books were used, the shrub following on from the juice already at hand.