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Cherry Shrub
Pit two quarts ripe cherries and mash. Bring to boiling point two pounds of sugar and two quarts of water, and boil ten minutes. Add the cherries, the juice of two lemons and one orange. Strain and chill. Serve with fresh cherries.
A cherry syrup thinned to drinking strength, from a temperance collection where "shrub" means fruit and sugar with no spirit or vinegar at all. It is simple, but the point at which the cherries meet the syrup decides whether the drink tastes of fresh fruit or of jam.
- Add the cherries off the heatThe recipe boils the syrup ten minutes, then adds fruit and citrus. Do not return it to the boil after that: let the mashed cherries steep in the hot syrup 20-30 minutes as it cools. Boiling the fruit dulls the bright flavour and drives off the lemon and orange aromatics.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo quarts of cherries is roughly 3 lb of fruit as bought, or a little under 3 lb once pitted. Two pounds of sugar to two quarts of water gives a syrup around 30 percent sugar by weight, which is sweet but not cloying once the fruit juice is in.
- Sour cherries were probably intendedSour cherries may have been intended -- sour varieties were widely grown and used in American households, though the recipe says only "ripe cherries". With modern sweet cherries such as Bing, cut the sugar to about 1 lb 4 oz and taste; add more lemon if it falls flat.
- StrainingPass it through a fine sieve first, then through damp muslin if you want a clear drink. Do not press the pulp through the cloth or the shrub turns cloudy and slightly bitter from the skins.
- Never crack the pitsCherry stones contain amygdalin. Discard them whole; do not crush or simmer them for flavour, as some older almond-scented recipes direct.
- Yield and serviceSomething over two quarts once strained. Serve very cold over ice with a few whole fresh cherries in the glass, or treat it as a concentrate: two parts shrub to one part cold or sparkling water.
- KeepingWith this little sugar it is a fresh drink, not a preserve. Refrigerate and use within four or five days; it also freezes well in ice-cube trays for later use.
"Shrub" comes from the Arabic sharāb, a drink, and in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English and American use it meant fruit juice preserved with sugar and either vinegar or rum, then diluted for the table. Temperance cookery took the word and quietly dropped the spirit, which is exactly what has happened here: the familiar name and the familiar sugar-and-citrus method are kept, but the preservative and the kick are gone, leaving a cordial. Cherries — cheap and briefly in season — were an obvious substitute for anything stronger.