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Currant Shrub, White or Red
Put two quarts of red or white currants into a jar. Cover it closely, and place it in a large pan of cold water. Let it simmer gently until the juice flows freely. Then strain the juice, and allow six ounces of loaf sugar, and a quart of rum to every pint of juice. The sugar should be stirred until dissolved in the warm liquid, and the spirit added afterwards. Strain and bottle for use. Time, one hour and a half or two hours to draw out the juice. Sufficient for three pints of shrub. Probable cost of currants, 4d. per quart.
A spirit shrub rather than the vinegar kind: currant juice drawn out gently over water, sweetened, and let down with rum. The whole thing hangs on never letting the fruit actually boil.
- The hinge: gentle heat onlyThe jar sits in a pan of cold water that is brought up slowly, so the fruit weeps rather than cooks. Water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, for the full hour and a half to two hours; a hard boil breaks the fruit, clouds the juice and gives a stewed, jammy flavour instead of a bright one.
- The jar and panThis is a water bath. Use a heatproof preserving jar or a bowl, covered with foil or a lid, standing on a folded cloth or trivet in a deep pan so the glass is not in direct contact with the base. Water should come at least halfway up the jar.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white cane sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is the modern equivalent. Six ounces is close to a cup (about seven-eighths). Dissolve it in the juice while the juice is still warm, then let the mixture cool before the rum goes in, or you will drive off spirit.
- Two quarts of currantsRoughly 2.5 lb of fruit, which yields somewhere near a pint of free-run juice, though ripe fruit gives more. Measure the juice you actually get before scaling the sugar and rum, since the recipe is a ratio, not a fixed list. Frozen currants work well and in fact release juice more readily, having been ruptured by freezing.
- Finding currantsRibes cultivation was restricted across much of the United States for most of the twentieth century because the plants host white pine blister rust, and some states still limit it. Fresh currants are seasonal and local; frozen fruit from European suppliers is the reliable route.
- A quart of rum per pint of juiceThat is two parts spirit to one part juice, and the finished shrub lands somewhere near 25-27 per cent alcohol. It is a cordial to be poured in small glasses or lengthened with soda water, not a cup drink. The recipe specifies only rum; a dark rum stands up to the fruit better than a light one.
- Straining and bottlingStrain the hot juice through a jelly bag or several layers of muslin without pressing, or the shrub will be cloudy. Bottle in clean glass with tight closures; the sugar and alcohol make it keep very well, and a month or two in a dark cupboard rounds off the raw edge of the spirit.
- YieldThree pints, as stated, from a pint of juice. That is around thirty small servings.
The word shrub comes from the Arabic sharāb, drink, and by the eighteenth century it covered two distinct English preparations: the vinegar-and-fruit syrup that survives in American colonial cookery, and this one, a sweetened fruit juice cut with rum or brandy. Rum shrub belonged to the second family and was a fixture of British public houses and private cellars through the nineteenth century, sold ready-made by wine merchants as well as put up at home. It is often said to have flourished in the West Country because smuggled spirit, rough from the cask, was much improved by fruit and sugar, though the link is traditional rather than documented. The entry prices currants at fourpence a quart, cheap against the quart of rum that went with every pint of juice.