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Shrub, Rum
Put a pint of lemon-juice to five pints of best Jamaica rum. With each quart of the mixture put one pound and a half of clarified loaf sugar. Strain, and bottle for use. If liked, the whole or part of the lemon-rind can be infused in the juice to flavour it.
A spirit shrub rather than the vinegar-and-fruit kind: essentially a homemade lemon rum liqueur that needs no cooking, only good juice and patience. The measurements are imperial and the sugar load is high by modern taste.
- Imperial pintsA pint here is 20 fl oz (568 ml), not the US 16. One pint of lemon juice takes roughly 12-16 lemons; five pints of rum is just under 2.9 litres, so this makes a large batch. Scaling to a fifth or a tenth loses nothing.
- Loaf sugar, clarifiedLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is the direct replacement. "Clarified" means dissolved in a little water, brought to a simmer and skimmed of scum, a step nineteenth-century sugar needed and modern sugar does not. Dissolve it in the lemon juice instead, warming gently if it is slow.
- How sweet it will beA pound and a half of sugar to each quart of mixture works out near 430 g per litre of finished shrub, which is sweeter than most commercial liqueurs. Cutting the sugar by a third still gives a stable, well-balanced drink.
- Jamaica rumThe book means a dark, pot-still Jamaican rum, and such rum was commonly sold at or near proof strength at the time. A modern pot-still Jamaican rum at 40-57% ABV is the right choice; once the sugar is in, the finished shrub lands somewhere around 24-34% ABV depending on the strength of your rum.
- The rindIf you infuse the peel, take it in wide strips with no white pith and give it two or three days in the juice, no longer. Beyond that the oils turn bitter and dominate the rum.
- Straining and settlingStrain through muslin or a coffee filter after the sugar has fully dissolved. Fresh citrus juice throws a haze and then a sediment; a week's rest and a second racking off the lees gives a clear bottle.
- Keeping and servingSugar and alcohol at this concentration make it shelf-stable for a year or more, and it improves over the first few months. Serve in small glasses, over ice with soda, or as the sweet-sour element in a punch in place of separate lemon and sugar. Yield is roughly 4.5 litres.
The word shrub is generally taken to derive from the Arabic sharāb, 'a drink', and the name came to cover two related English preparations: a vinegar-and-fruit syrup, later associated with the temperance table, and this one, a spirit sweetened and soured with citrus so that punch could be made from a single bottle. Rum shrub was one of the common forms, and it is traditionally, though not verifiably, linked with the West Country smuggling trade, where run rum was said to be cut with lemon and sugar to make rough spirit palatable. The specification of Jamaica rum is not decorative: heavily flavoured pot-still rum from Jamaica was the standard of quality in the British market.