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Shrub, Lemon or Orange
Take two lemons and six Seville oranges, or, if preferred, take eight sweet oranges. Grate off the rinds, and squeeze out the juice, then with each quart of juice put three pounds of powdered loaf sugar. Stir the sugar till it is dissolved, and put two quarts of best Jamaica rum with each quart of juice. Put the mixture into a cask, and shake it three times a day for three weeks. Let it stand in a cool place till clear. Filter, and bottle for use. (See ORANGE OR LEMON SHRUB.)
A rum cordial of the old English type, built on a fixed ratio rather than a fixed batch. Read the fruit quantities as a starting point and the per-quart figures as the actual formula.
- The recipe is a ratio, not a batchTwo lemons and six Seville oranges will not yield a quart of juice — expect somewhere well under it. The working formula is: per quart (4 cups) of strained juice, 3 lb sugar and 2 quarts rum. Scale down honestly: 1 cup juice, 12 oz sugar, 2 cups rum.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar sold in cones and broken up as needed. "Powdered" here means crushed fine, not modern powdered/confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will cloud the shrub. Use granulated or caster.
- QuartsCassell's is a British book, so a quart is 40 imperial fl oz (about 1.14 litres), not the US 32 oz. The ratio matters more than the absolute volume, so US measures work provided you keep them consistent throughout.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in season roughly January to February and sold seasonally at good greengrocers or online. Their juice is sharp and aromatic in a way sweet oranges are not; the eight-sweet-orange substitution gives a much softer, sweeter result and may want an extra lemon.
- The grated rindsThe instruction grates the rinds and then never mentions them again — a genuine gap in the text, though the cross-reference to ORANGE OR LEMON SHRUB may cover their use. Many period shrub recipes steep the zest with the juice and spirit and remove it at filtering. Zest only the coloured layer; white pith turns the cordial harshly bitter over three weeks.
- CaskSubstitute a large glass demijohn or a couple of wide-mouth jars with tight lids. Wood is unnecessary here and a fresh small cask will dominate the fruit. Leave headspace so the three-times-daily shaking actually moves the contents.
- Rum"Best Jamaica rum" meant a pungent pot-still spirit, typically well above 40% ABV. A funky Jamaican pot-still rum is the closest modern match; a light column-still white rum will read as thin against this much sugar.
- Clearing and filteringAfter three weeks, cold rest lets the citrus solids drop. Rack the clear liquid off the sediment first, then pass it through a coffee filter or fine muslin — filtering the whole cloudy batch will clog repeatedly.
- Yield and keepingThe scaled-down version above makes roughly 900 ml. At upwards of 20% ABV with heavy sugar it keeps well in sealed bottles; serve in small glasses, over ice, or lengthened with soda.
The word shrub comes from the Arabic sharāb, meaning a drink, and reached English by way of the sweetened fruit syrups of the Levant. Two quite different drinks travelled under the name: the American vinegar shrub, a fruit-and-vinegar syrup for mixing with water, and this British spirituous version, a citrus-and-rum cordial that flourished from the eighteenth century onward. It is often said that rum shrub owed its popularity to the smuggling trade along the south coast of England, where sugar and citrus masked the character of rough landed spirit — traditional rather than documented, though the drink's strong association with West Country and Channel ports is real enough. Its presence in Cassell's, alongside the ratafias and orange wines, reflects a Victorian household that still expected to lay down its own cordials, and the reliance on Seville oranges places the making squarely in the short winter weeks when the bitter fruit came into the shops.