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Strawberry Shrub
Hull twelve pounds of ripe strawberries, crush and mash them and squeeze the juice from them through a cloth. Put the juice in a pan over the fire together with the strained juice of half a dozen good-sized lemons, bring it to the boil and let it boil fast for five minutes; then add six pounds of loaf sugar and when this has melted let it boil for six minutes longer. Remove it from the fire, let it cool, skimming as it cools, and when quite cold mix in one and one-half pints of brandy or whiskey. Bottle it being very particular to see that the bottles are perfectly clean. They should first be well washed in soda and water and then rinsed out with boiling water. Cork the bottles with new corks soaked in cold water. Cut them off even with the top, seal with sealing-wax or bees-wax and rosin melted together in equal quantities, and lay the bottles on their sides in dry sawdust.
A spirited fruit cordial rather than a cocktail — a concentrate to be diluted with cold or sparkling water, or splashed into punch. The whole point is a syrup acid enough and sweet enough to keep, so the lemon juice and the full weight of sugar are structural, not seasoning.
- Scale it downTwelve pounds of berries and six pounds of sugar yields something on the order of a gallon and a half of finished shrub. A quarter batch — 3 lb strawberries, 1 1/2 lemons, 1 1/2 lb sugar, 3/4 cup brandy or whiskey — behaves identically and fits a normal pan.
- Loaf sugarRefined white sugar, sold in the period as a hard cone or block to be broken up. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight.
- Extracting the juiceCrush the hulled berries and let them stand 20-30 minutes before pressing; the sugar-free maceration loosens far more juice. A jelly bag or a double layer of cheesecloth works better than a fine sieve, which clogs with pulp.
- Why the sugar goes in secondThe five-minute boil before sugaring drives off some water and throws up a scum that can be skimmed. Sugar added at the start raises the boiling point and encourages scorching against the pan bottom.
- Skim while coolingThe recipe skims as the syrup cools rather than during the boil; scum continues to rise as it drops below a simmer, and it lifts off more easily then.
- Add the spirit coldMixing brandy into hot syrup boils off the alcohol and much of the aroma. Wait until the syrup is genuinely at room temperature.
- Alcohol is not the preservative hereA pint and a half of spirit in this volume works out to only about 5-6 percent by volume in the finished shrub. What keeps it is the sugar concentration plus the lemon acidity, so do not reduce either. Store bottles cool and dark, and refrigerate once opened.
- Bottles and sealsThe soda-and-water wash followed by a boiling-water rinse is sound practice and worth keeping. Screw-top bottles remove the need for wax; if you do cork, the horizontal storage keeps the cork damp and swollen so it does not shrink and admit air.
- ServingRoughly one part shrub to four or five parts cold still or soda water, over ice. It also stands in well for grenadine or simple syrup in a whiskey sour.
Shrub comes through English from the Arabic sharāb, simply "a drink," and by the eighteenth century the word covered two related things in British and American households: a fruit syrup soured with vinegar, and a fruit syrup fortified with rum or brandy. The spirited kind, of which this is one, was a practical way to hold a summer fruit crop through the year and to have a punch base ready to hand — the alcohol and sugar together giving something that could be corked, waxed and cellared. Oscar Tschirky included it in his 1896 collection alongside a long run of domestic preserves and bottled drinks, which is a reminder that a grand hotel kitchen at the end of the century still did the work of a well-run country house: putting up fruit in season, in quantity, against the winter.