shrubs are acidified syrups used to make beverages. One variety of shrub blends citrus juice with sugar to make a syrup that’s then mixed with rum or brandy. This type of shrub is related to a punch; in fact, spirits writer David Wondrich believes it might have been a prototype for punch. Another variety of shrub is a syrup made of fruit juice (or, in rarer cases, vegetable juice), sugar, and vinegar. See fruit juice; sugar; and vinegar.
“Shrub” is derived from the Arabic word sharāb, or beverage, from which is also derived the Persian word sharbat, which denotes a nonalcoholic beverage that combines sugar and water and is usually flavored with a fruit or spice. Words derived from sharbat include the Turkish derivative sherbet, the Italian sorbetto, and the French sorbet, along with the English word syrup, which comes via the Latin siropus. The drink, which dates back to at least the twelfth century, was first served very cold over ice or snow brought down from the mountains, or it was frozen by placing a vessel of sherbet into a saltpeter bath to chill it.
Western Europeans encountered sherbets and shrubs as early as the mid-sixteenth century. In the 1540s and 1550s, a French botanist named Pierre Belon encountered sherbets made of figs, plums, pears, peaches, apricots, and grapes on the streets of Turkey. The philosopher Francis Bacon wrote of sherbet in 1627, describing it as a type of candied conserve, made of sugar and lemons or sugar and violets or other flowers. As traders from Venice and other mercantile cities did business with Persia, Egypt, and Turkey, they encountered sherbet and eventually brought the beverage home, chiefly in the version that used citrus juice as its flavoring.
Pastry Cook’s Vade-Mecum: there were lemons and sugar and water, to be sure, but there were also two quarts of brandy and a quart of wine. This conception was the common one. In New York, an act of 1732 set a levy on the importation of rum, brandy, other distilled liquor, or shrub. By the mid-1730s, taverns and vintners were offering bottled shrub for sale as, essentially, a sort of bottled punch base, complete with everything but the customary large portion of hot or cold water that diluted punch to wine strength and a scraping of nutmeg. James Ashley, of the famous London Punch House, offered his famous Seville orange shrub—the only kind he would use for making punch—in quantities up to the large barrels known as hogsheads. See punch.Shrub also found a place aboard ships. In 1747 an anonymous correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine suggests equipping ships with fruit, especially lemons and oranges. Should carrying fruit prove impractical, the writer suggests that “a mixture of lemon juice and rum (shrub as they call it) may be carried in any quantity, as it will keep a long time.” Shrub proved to be useful for sailors for an important reason: the citrus in it contained vitamin C, which was later found to prevent scurvy. In fact, the prevalence of scurvy aboard ships prompted the first clinical trials in medicine. James Lind, a Scottish physician who served in the British Royal Navy, found that scurvy killed more British sailors than it did their French and Spanish rivals. Though Lind didn’t understand the role or even the existence of vitamins, he suspected that citrus had an antiscorbutic effect and set out to test the theory by giving one group of scorbutic sailors a ration of citrus. (Other groups drank such things as vinegar and cider.) Naval officers were convinced enough by Lind’s work that they began mixing citrus juice and sugar into the twice-daily issue of grog (rum and water). See citrus.
As more practical and portable sources of vitamin C became available, shrub became less frequently transported aboard ship, but by this time, shrub was popular in England’s North American colonies. Around this time, the vinegar version of shrub began to gain popularity in those colonies, and after the United States declared its independence, vinegar shrubs became fairly common in some parts of the country—in no small case because citrus was expensive to import into colonial America, and vinegar was an acceptable substitute. Its use as a citrus substitute in America is attested to as early as 1678, when a ledger preserved among the colonial governor of New York’s papers has a line for “3 pints rum 2 lb. sugar and a [quart] vinegar … to make punch.” Vinegar shrubs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a simple blend of vinegar, sugar, and fruit, cooked together to form a syrup. The vinegar and sugar acted as preservatives to keep fruit from going bad, thus extending its shelf life. Similar to Persian sharbat, vinegar shrub would be mixed with water to form a sort of soft drink. They were also prescribed for medicinal purposes for various ailments.
Both forms of shrub—vinegar and citrus—declined in popularity toward the end of the nineteenth century. Evolutions in food preservation made shrub’s preservative properties unnecessary, as the ability to sell fruit in cans or in frozen form developed, and the eclipse of the shared bowl of punch as an everyday social drink removed it from the bartender’s daily work.
The cocktail renaissance of the early 2000s marked a return to form for the shrub, as American bartenders began to rediscover it. See cocktail renaissance. Currently, the preferred form of shrub in the bar world is the vinegar-based version, though the rum-and-citrus version lives on in bars that serve punch and finds an echo in tiki bars. Vinegar-based shrubs include versions based on any imaginable fruit and also sometimes vegetables such as carrot or celery. Bartenders find that shrub gives them a way to feature bright fruit flavors without also adding a lot of sweetness. They also provide a good base for crafting nonalcoholic cocktails. See mocktail.
Dietsch, Michael. Shrubs: An Old-Fashioned Drink for Modern Times. New York: Countryman, 2016.
Jurafsky, Dan. The Language of Food. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
Lind, James. A Treatise on the Scurvy. London: 1757.
Ramadan, Nesta. Persian Cooking. Bethesda, MD: Iranbooks, 1997.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: Michael Dietsch