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Rum Shrub, to Make
To give one method of making rum shrub. Pour a pint of cold water over the rinds of two or three Seville oranges, and let them infuse for a day or two. Strain the liqueur, and boil it with two pounds of loaf sugar to syrup. Add a pint of strained Seville orange-juice and three pints of Jamaica rum. Filter the preparation, and bottle for use. Time, three days.
A bottled citrus-and-rum cordial rather than a mixed drink, and it keeps for years. Almost everything depends on getting bitter orange peel without pith and on not scorching the syrup.
- Seville orangesThe bitter orange sold for marmalade, in season roughly January to February; frozen juice and whole fruit turn up in Latin markets as naranja agria. Nothing else tastes the same, though a mix of orange and lemon juice is the usual stand-in.
- Pare the rind thinly"Rinds" here most likely means the coloured zest only. White pith carried into the infusion gives a coarse, dull bitterness that no amount of sugar covers.
- Loaf sugarCone sugar, a refined grade of the period, bought as a hard loaf and broken up. Ordinary granulated white sugar is its direct equivalent; two pounds is about 4 1/2 cups.
- Boiling to syrupDissolve the sugar in the strained infusion over low heat and give it only a short boil. A pint of water to two pounds of sugar is already a heavy syrup and will catch and caramelise quickly.
- Add the rum off the heatThe recipe does not say so, but the syrup should be cool before the juice and rum go in. Hot syrup drives off the alcohol and dulls the fresh orange.
- Jamaica rumIn this period that meant a dark, heavily flavoured pot-still spirit, often at or above 40% ABV. A pot-still Jamaican dark rum gives the intended character; the finished shrub lands somewhere around 20-25% ABV, depending on the rum.
- FilteringCitrus oils and pectin leave it cloudy. A coffee filter or several layers of muslin will clear it, slowly; letting the bottles stand a week and decanting off the sediment works as well.
- Yield and keepingAround five to six pints. Sugar and alcohol both preserve it, so it keeps for years in sealed bottles and improves over the first few months. Serve in small glasses, or a spoonful in hot water or punch.
- The "three days"That is the peel infusion, not work. Active time is under an hour.
Shrub comes from the Arabic sharāb, drink, the same root that gives us sherbet and syrup, and by the eighteenth century it named a British bottled cordial of spirit, citrus juice and sugar — quite distinct from the American vinegar-based fruit shrub of the same name. Rum shrub is often said to have a connection with smuggling, though the explanation — that spirits and citrus landed together, and that the sugar and juice masked the character of rough, freshly run spirit — belongs to tradition rather than to record. Seville oranges anchor it to the winter marmalade season, when bitter oranges arrived from Spain in quantity and a household bought them by the box, making the cordial one more use for the same short-lived fruit.