Making Shrubs – Not the Bushes in Your Yard

There are some recipes you can only make with the delicious fruits of summer, and a shrub is one of them. If you’ve never heard of a shrub, other than the bushes in your yard, then get ready for a whole new meaning and a great recipe perfect for hot summer days.

In a nutshell: a shrub is vinegar that’s been infused with fruit and then sweetened.

The word shrub is derived from the Arabic word sharbah, which means to drink when translated. It’s also where the words syrup and sorbet come from.

When finished, the shrub can be used as the base for a fruity vinaigrette or a syrup for ice cream floats but its most common application is when it’s mixed with water or alcohol and served as cold as you can get it.

Shrubs will turn any glass of water or spirits into a bright and refreshing, naturally flavored cocktail or fruit-ade.

These kinds of vinegar-infused, fruit-filled beverages were popular in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as colonial America. Most recipes called for lemons or oranges and so it was also popular among sailors and pirates as a preventative against scurvy.

They reached peak popularity in the middle of the 19th Century, thanks to the best-selling books at the time, books like The Virginian Housewife, The Kentucky Housewife, and Buckeye Cookery. The recipes found in these popular cookbooks incorporated, for the first time in shrub’s history, the local fruits and berries associated with the American forests, especially the raspberry.

According to Joyce White and her research at Taste of History, the earliest American recipe for shrub was by Lydia Marie Childs, from her book The American Frugal Housewife (1830).

“Raspberry shrub mixed with water is a pure delicious drink for summer,” her recipe began.

Selecting Ingredients

We agree with the authors of those 19th-century cookbooks: berries make the best shrubs, but you can also use cherries, peaches, plums, melons, even apples and pears. Fruits should be ripe and sweet but need not be perfect. A shrub is a great opportunity to ask the farmers at the market if they have any discounted fruits, what they call seconds.

A shrub can also be made with any type of vinegar. We made ours using a 1-to-1 ratio of white wine vinegar and apple cider vinegar. Once you get started, you can begin to experiment with different combinations.

Let’s Make a Shrub

We’re going to be enjoying shrubs all summer long using the easy recipe below. Once it’s ready, it’s best served outside, at the end of a long day, mixed with lots of ice and your favorite alcoholic spirit. We hope you’ll enjoy it this summer too!

Notes

Your shrub can be kept in the refrigerator for up to six months.
Some recipes call for mashing the fruit. This may result in a cloudy product
If you prefer, use 2 cups of sugar in place of the honey. Mix the sugar and infused vinegar over medium heat until the sugar is completely dissolved.
Experiment with other fruits, find out what tastes best to you

What can you do with your shrub?

We’ve created a few recipes that you can print here.

Shrub Recipes

Don’t Discard the Fruit

We like to think like they did back in the day, nothing was thrown out, so if you’re like us, then after the shrub is done, you’re probably wondering the same thing: what to do with the remaining fruit?

Here’s something we came up with:

Remove the vanilla bean.
Mix the fruit with a half cup of sugar (or to taste) and stir well to combine.

This makes an outstanding topping for ice cream or other desserts. It's also a good tart jam, great on muffins and scones.

Fruit and Herb Pairings

Once you start making your own shrubs, you might want to try spicing things up with herbs and other flavorings. Here are a few suggestions-

Note: always use whole spices. Ground spices will cause cloudiness and may also affect the texture of your shrub. Remove them from your resulting mash before adding sugar.

Some Final Notes

Drinks made with your homemade shrub can be enjoyed all summer. We’ve created a downloadable list of a few recipes to enjoy.

If you’re as adventurous as us in the kitchen and at the market, you’ll probably want to start exploring and experimenting by making shrubs with various vegetables such as garden-fresh tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, even fennel or beets .

We think those all sound like delicious quaffs for a summer day! We’d love to hear if you’ve discovered your own shrub recipe. Send them to info@farmtocity.org so we can enjoy them too!