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Orange or Lemon Shrub
Make a syrup by boiling a quart of strained orange or lemon-juice with four pounds of powdered loaf sugar. When quite clear, add a pint of rum to each half pint of syrup. Put the mixture into a perfectly sweet dry cask, and shake it twice a day for a fortnight; leave it for six weeks, when it may be drained off, and bottled. Time, two months to prepare.
A Victorian rum shrub: citrus syrup fortified with spirit and left to marry for two months. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are imperial and the rum-to-syrup ratio needs reading carefully before you buy anything.
- The ratio is the hingeA pint of rum to each half pint of syrup means two parts spirit to one part syrup, not the reverse. A quart of juice boiled with four pounds of sugar yields roughly two quarts of syrup, which would call for around eight pints (4.5 litres) of rum. Scale the whole thing down before you start unless you want a cask-sized batch.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz (1.14 L) and a pint is 20 fl oz (570 ml), both larger than US measures. A quart of strained lemon juice is roughly 25-30 lemons; oranges, being juicier, perhaps 15-20.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar was sold as hard cones and broken or crushed for use, so "powdered loaf sugar" is simply plain white granulated or caster sugar. Four pounds is 1.8 kg, giving a very heavy syrup — that density plus the spirit is what preserves the finished shrub.
- "When quite clear"The syrup is done when the sugar has fully dissolved and the boiling liquid has stopped throwing up cloudy scum. Skim as it rises and strain through muslin; citrus juice carries pulp and pectin that will haze the bottled result.
- A "perfectly sweet dry cask"Sweet here means clean and free of any sour or musty smell, not sugared. A glass demijohn or a wide-mouthed jar with an airtight lid does the job better than wood and lets you see the clarity develop.
- Time and shakingTwo weeks of twice-daily shaking dissolves and marries everything; the six weeks that follow are for settling, so leave the jar undisturbed and decant off the clear liquid, leaving the sediment behind.
- Strength and keepingWith rum at 40 percent, the finished shrub lands somewhere near 25-30 percent alcohol and is heavily sugared, so it will keep for years in sealed bottles in a cool dark place. Serve it in small glasses, or long with soda water and ice.
"Shrub" comes through English from the Arabic sharāb, a drink, the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup. In Britain the word settled on this kind of thing — citrus juice, sugar and spirit left to mature — and it is often linked with the eighteenth-century smuggling trade, since rum and brandy landed duty-free were commonly turned into sweetened cordials for domestic use and for the sea. The American shrub, made with vinegar rather than spirit, is a separate branch of the same family. This is a drink of the still-room, the part of a Victorian household that produced cordials, ratafias and flavoured spirits in quantity; a recipe that occupies a cask for two months assumes a house with cellar space and a mistress who planned her drinks a season ahead.