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Lemon Shrub
American Concentrated Lemon Shrub Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts; Fruit Acid, 1 ounce.
This is a fountain dispenser's formula rather than a domestic recipe: four quarts of finished syrup to be drawn an ounce or two at a time into carbonated water. Two of the three ingredients are trade goods, so the whole thing has to be read as a set of proportions.
- What the proportions actually meanOne part concentrated shrub syrup to three parts plain syrup, plus a small acid correction. If you compound your own lemon shrub base, keep that 1:3 dilution as the starting point and adjust to taste rather than treating it as fixed.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" is simple syrup, cooked just until clear and cooled; published fountain proportions vary considerably, and the book does not specify one. A thinner syrup will make the finished drink watery and will keep less well.
- American Concentrated Lemon Shrub SyrupEvidently a bought concentrate rather than something made in the kitchen, and not obtainable now. The nearest substitute is a strong lemon shrub base of your own: lemon juice and zest with sugar, sharpened with a little cider or white wine vinegar.
- Fruit acid is ambiguousFountain manuals used the term for a solution of citric or tartaric acid in water, but the strength varied from house to house and the book does not say which is meant. One ounce of a dilute solution and one ounce of dry crystals are wildly different things, so treat this as "acidulate to taste" and add a little at a time.
- Yield and dosingOne gallon of syrup. At the usual fountain measure of about 1 to 1.5 fluid ounces per glass, that is on the order of 85 to 128 drinks.
- ServingSyrup into the glass first, then coarse carbonated water drawn against the side to preserve the gas, stirred as little as possible. Shrub syrups were also served with plain iced water for anyone who wanted the tartness without the fizz.
- KeepingA syrup this sweet and this acid keeps well refrigerated, but it is not sterile. Bottle it clean, keep it cold, and discard it if it clouds or ferments.
Shrub reached English through Arabic sharāb, a drink, and for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it meant a sweetened concentrate of fruit juice preserved with vinegar or spirit, kept in the pantry and diluted at the table. When the American soda fountain absorbed the household drink cabinet in the later nineteenth century, shrub seems to have survived as a flavour category rather than a method: fountain shrubs were often tart, citrus-forward syrups, and the vinegar that once did the preserving appears to have become optional or to have vanished entirely. Formulas like this one show how far the trade had moved from cooking — the dispenser is not making lemon syrup at all, but blending a bought concentrate with house-made plain syrup and correcting the balance with a bottle of acid, the same logic a bartender uses today when cutting a commercial cordial.