Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lemon or Orange Shrub
Lemon or Orange Shrub
Take two lemons and six Seville oranges, grate off the rinds and squeeze out the juice; to one pint of juice add a pound and a half of powdered loaf sugar. Stir the sugar till it is dissolved, and add a quart of the best Jamaica rum. Pour it into a jar, and shake it three times daily for three weeks. Let it stand in a cool place till clear. Then filter, and bottle for use.
A rum shrub in the older English sense: a sweetened citrus cordial meant to be kept and diluted, not a vinegar drinking shrub. Nothing here is difficult, but the original leaves a few things unstated.
- The grated rindThe recipe tells you to grate the rinds but never says what to do with them; the sense of the instruction is that the zest goes into the jar with the juice and sugar and comes out again at the filtering stage. Grate only the coloured layer; the white pith turns the cordial harshly bitter over three weeks.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or powdered loaf sugar was refined sugar broken or ground from a cone. Ordinary granulated sugar is the equivalent; caster dissolves faster in cold juice. A pound and a half to a pint of juice is roughly 680 g to 570 ml, which is a heavy syrup and is what keeps the bottle stable.
- Seville orangesBitter Seville oranges are sour and aromatic, nothing like a supermarket eating orange, and they appear in British shops only from late December to February. Out of season, a mix of regular orange juice sharpened with extra lemon and a little grapefruit approximates the acidity, though not the perfume of the peel.
- Getting to a pint of juiceTwo lemons and six Sevilles will not usually reach a full pint (570 ml) unless the fruit is large and juicy; expect to need eight or nine oranges. Squeeze first, measure, then scale the sugar and rum to what you actually have.
- The rum"Best Jamaica rum" meant a pungent, pot-still dark rum, not a light column-still white. A funky Jamaican dark rum at 40-45% ABV is the closest modern match, and its character carries the drink.
- Three weeks of shakingThe daily agitation is there to keep the sugar in solution and to extract the oils from the zest. Use a jar with a proper seal, keep it out of direct light, and do not skip the resting period at the end -- the cordial only drops clear once it stops being disturbed.
- FilteringStrain out the zest through muslin first, then pass the liquid through a paper coffee filter for clarity. It is slow; let it drip rather than pressing, which pushes solids through.
- Yield and useAbout two litres, or nearly three standard bottles, once the dissolved sugar is counted along with the juice and rum. Shrub was drunk in small glasses, added to punch, or let down with hot or cold water; a tablespoon or two per glass is the usual measure. Sealed and cool, it should keep for a year or more.
"Shrub" comes from the Arabic sharāb, a drink, reaching English by way of the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup, though the date of its arrival in this sense is uncertain. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain it meant a keeping cordial of citrus, sugar and spirit -- rum or brandy -- and it is often said to have flourished among coastal households where smuggled spirit and imported fruit both arrived at the quayside. The pairing of Jamaica rum with Seville oranges in a book like Cassell's is a small map of British trade: sugar and rum from the Caribbean, bitter oranges from Spain, the two meeting in a jar on a domestic shelf. It was made in winter when the Sevilles came in and the same fruit was being turned into marmalade.