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Currant and Raspberry Shrub
Stem and wash four quarts of currants and two quarts of red raspberries. Cover with three quarts of water and boil for ten minutes. Strain through a jelly bag. To every cup of liquid add one cup of sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved, bring to the boiling point, and pour at once into sterilized jars to overflowing. Screw on tops and next morning tighten the covers and keep in a cool place.
A sweetened fruit syrup to be diluted at the table, not a vinegar shrub. The whole thing is straightforward; the parts worth thinking about are the currants themselves and how you store the finished bottles.
- Finding currantsRed currants are seasonal and regional in the US, largely because of a long-standing federal and state ban on Ribes planting tied to white pine blister rust, much of which has since been relaxed. Frozen currants work perfectly here, and frozen raspberries even better, since freezing ruptures the cells and improves the juice yield.
- Volume, not weightFour quarts of stemmed currants is roughly 4 to 5 lb; two quarts of raspberries perhaps 2 to 3 lb. With three quarts of water added, expect a few quarts of strained juice, and the same again in sugar by volume.
- The jelly bagLet it drip rather than squeezing. Pressing forces pulp and pectin through and gives a cloudy syrup that later throws sediment in the bottle. A double layer of damp muslin in a sieve does the same job.
- Equal sugar by cupCup for cup with the juice is a heavy syrup, and deliberately so: the sugar is the preservative and the reason a spoonful will flavour a whole glass of water. Do not reduce it if you intend to keep the jars any length of time.
- Do not boil it down"Bring to the boiling point" means just that. Prolonged boiling after the sugar goes in darkens the colour and dulls the raspberry, which is the more fragile of the two flavours.
- SealingHot-filling to overflowing and screwing the lids down was standard practice when this was written. Current guidance for fruit syrups is a boiling-water bath of about 10 minutes for half-pints and pints, or simply keeping the jars in the refrigerator and using them within a few months. Discard any jar that shows mould or fermentation.
- ServingAbout two tablespoons of syrup to a tall glass of iced water or soda water, adjusted to taste. The batch yields several quarts of syrup, so a good many glasses.
"Shrub" in American usage covers two related things: the vinegar-based drinking syrup of colonial kitchens, and — as here — a simple boiled fruit syrup for diluting, the name having drifted from the Arabic sharāb, to drink, by way of eighteenth-century punch-making. Temperance-era collections of non-alcoholic drinks leaned heavily on fruit syrups, cider and ginger drinks. Currants and raspberries ripen at much the same time in a northern garden, and the pairing recurs in period preserving books; the currants bring acid and pectin, the raspberries perfume.