Home › The Principles of Cookery › Shrub, White Currant
Shrub, White Currant
Bruise the currants, and put them on a sieve covered with muslin, that the juice may run from them. Dissolve in each quart of juice half a pound of powdered loaf sugar, add a pint of rum, and bottle for use.
A spirit shrub rather than the vinegar kind: white currant juice, sugar and rum, bottled and left to mellow. The whole thing hinges on getting clear juice, so resist the urge to press the pulp.
- Measures are ImperialCassell's quart is 40 fl oz and its pint 20 fl oz, so the ratio is half a pound of sugar and one part rum to two parts juice. In US measures the rum-to-juice ratio is the same (2 cups rum per US quart of juice), but half a pound of sugar in a 32 fl oz US quart gives a noticeably sweeter mix than in the 40 fl oz Imperial quart.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone and crushed; "powdered" here means crushed fine, not modern powdered/icing sugar with its cornstarch. Caster or superfine sugar dissolves cleanly in cold juice.
- Let it dripBruise the fruit only enough to split the skins, then let gravity do the rest overnight. Squeezing or wringing the muslin pushes pectin and pulp through and the shrub will never clear.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of white currants gives roughly a pint of juice. A quart of juice plus a pint of rum and the sugar makes close to 1.5 quarts of finished shrub, which is nearer two and a half ordinary wine bottles than two.
- The rumThe recipe does not specify a rum, though rum shrub is commonly associated with dark Jamaica rum. With a spirit around 40% ABV the finished drink lands somewhere near 12-14% alcohol, a cordial to be sipped or lengthened with soda rather than a spirit.
- Fermentation risk in the bottleFresh juice carries wild yeast and 13% alcohol will not always stop it. Fill bottles with headroom, keep them cold, and check for pressure over the first fortnight rather than sealing tight and forgetting them.
- KeepingStrain again through a coffee filter after a month, when the sediment has dropped, and rebottle. It should improve over the following months; white currant is delicate and its flavour is likely to fade with long keeping.
"Shrub" comes from the Arabic sharab, a drink (from the verb shariba, to drink), and by the eighteenth century it named two rather different things in English: the vinegar-and-fruit syrup kept as a summer drink in farmhouses, and this one, a sweetened fruit juice let down with rum or brandy. The spirit version is bound up with the West Country smuggling trade, where rum shrub is traditionally said to have been a way of making rough contraband rum palatable, and it survived respectably into the Victorian drinks cupboard as a bottled cordial. Its appearance in Cassell's alongside currant jelly and currant wine reflects a household reality of the period: a fruiting currant bush produces far more than anyone can eat fresh, over a couple of weeks, and every part of the glut had to be turned into something that kept. White currants, being less acid and less strongly coloured than red, made the mildest and palest of these preparations.