Fruity-Floral Raw Vinegar Shrubs

It’s the age of wellness drinks isn’t it?

Kombucha, kvass, switchels, shrubs and sekanjabin. Roman posca, somewhere after sekanjabin and oxymeli in historical lineage. They’re all different, they’ve each their own trajectories, but usually one thing in common: vinegar.

Vinegar is being made (kombucha, kvass) or vinegar is being used (switchels, shrubs…) in each of these acidulated concoctions, which are all really variations on the theme of what we call now “sipping vinegars” or tart tonics. There are a dozen brands that make sipping vinegars, each one touting a set of health benefits or promising a cleanse or some such. I’m not here to cut through that noise or to dispel myths about the efficacy of drinking vinegars. While I come from a culture that understands very deeply the impact of sourness on taste, relish and therefore salivation and digestion (hence all the rasams of India, and all the souring agents used to pep food), it appears the Western world is just (re)awakening to these sours with typical capitalizing gusto. That romance can run its course but what concerns me here is the idea of the shrub which has been around for a long while, and the idea of the acidulated vinegar drink.

The shrub owes its existence to the idea of the sharbat, whose name derives from the medieval Arabic sharāb, which is a drink or water dosed with medicinal herbs and other potions, and connotes alcohol. Technically it’s sharb, which became shrab and on Western tongues the modern-day shrub. It belongs thus in the family of falooda, but as a second cousin twice removed because really it’s not as layered nor nearly as complex. What it is, is a simple diluted fruit vinegar which is, above all things, bracing, cooling, refreshing, quenching.

Historically, however, it has had a few uses. Date vinegar presumably made Babylonian water a little safer to drink. The Roman posca was wine vinegar and water, reserved for soldiers and slaves. The British navy apparently used shrubs (and pickles) to ward off scurvy on sea voyages. Shrubs were thus thirst-quenching alternatives to alcohol, or a way not to waste wine-turned-vinegar in the case of posca, or a way to teach housewives to be frugal in 19th century America: “in a country where raspberries are abundant, it is good economy to make it answer instead of Port and Catalonia wine” [Source]. Shrubs were economical, they were not wasteful, they were a class drink that became haute, in course.

The sekanjabin [Persian] and the oxymeli [Greek] are bit different from shrubs and very likely closer to the medicinal roots of sharbats themselves: both are acid (vinegar) + honey concoctions but with herbal infusions that can make them more pointedly medicinal. Sekanjabin uses mint and even foreshadows the salad dressing in the sense that it is served alongside lettuce heads, to be dunked and dipped.

The early English version of the shrub derives from these very medicinal cocktails, though vinegar is notably absent. Instead, spices are infused in spirits like rum, giving us things like the Rum Shrub that was popular until the 18th century (when maybe gins came into favor and the G&T became the one refresher to rule them all?). Shrub was some citrus juice, water, sugar, and either rum or brandy. Michael Dietsch in his book on Shrubs cites this 1736 definition: “[A] compound of brandy, the juice of Sevil oranges and lemons kept in a vessel for the ready making of punch at any time, by the addition of water and sugar.”

Somewhere along the 17th century way the shrub came to colonial America where it became hugely popular, but it remained citrus-based until the turn of the 19th century when vinegar makes its entry–but not as a genuine fruit vinegar, made by juicing, fermenting to wine and then ageing to vinegar, more as a faster, even impatient, certainly all-American route to fruit preservation and quick acidulation: don’t make it, add it! The American shrub was made from steeping fruits in vinegar, straining out the fruit, sweetening the strained liquid, reducing it to a syrup and using that either medicinally (raspberry vinegar was touted as good for slaking fever-induced thirsts) or as a base for spritzers and other mixed drinks, especially during prohibition. It’s still not uncommon to see shrubs being described as great ways to enjoy seasonal fruits, though was ever done with the actual fruit pulp remains something of a mystery.

The switchel meantime had appeared in the Caribbean, an off-shoot of sugar production in the plantations as it consisted of vinegar, ginger, molasses, and water: cheaper than rum for slaves. In New England of the 1600s molasses was sometimes swapped out for honey and the drink given to farmers at harvest: hence the moniker “Haymaker’s punch.”

These days recipes for switchels and shrubs abound, and almost all without fail call for the use of a pre-made vinegar. It bears mentioning that raw vinegars would have once been the norm for all the preparations mentioned in this post–but now no more, since most shelf-stable vinegars are pasteurized and pretty much dead. They’re acidic enough for taste, but without the live cultures that make them invaluable to gut health. Vinegar drinks ought fall into the category of “sour tonic beverages,” as Sandor Katz calls them in The Art of Fermentation, “teeming with live lactic acid bacteria (among others) and generally regarded as healthful and tonic.” But they don’t necessarily all do. Kombucha can be an exception, since the drink is made by fermentation and never with the use of pre-made vinegars, but that, too, these days depends on who is making and how they’re selling. Fermentation proceeding apace in glass bottles sitting on even refrigerated shelves are always at risk of exploding, so the arts of making and selling live cultures needs to be monitored closely, and is typically relegated to small craft production.

Backtrack a bit here then. Why buy? Why not return to the oldest shrubs which were undoubtedly made from fermenting fruit and/or rescuing wine-turned-vinegar–why not just make shrub syrups from the liquids exuded by mascerating fruits instead of using pre-made vinegars?

The result of these even in a single, warm day is a sweet-sour drink which can still be left to sour (and fizz) even more on its own. It thus requires no additional vinegar or sweetening to turn it into a perfectly wonderful, all-natural, and quite alive shrub. Yes, it takes longer, but not that much longer. Berries and other soft-bodied fruit with plenty of wild yeasts on their surfaces will ferment and sour in a pinch. A little patience, and you’ll have them vinegary enough to work as a shrub.

Don’t stop with fruits, flower petals are lovely additions to ferments, too. Rose, amaltas (cassia fistula), mahua, butterfly pea, passion flowers are all easy to work with and can produce tasty flavored and even scented liquids that can become shrub syrups on their own or combined with others. The basic process is up already in my Desi Rose & Gulkand post.

Yes, all these can have a little alcohol content–that’s inevitable with fermentation–but that varies from fruit to fruit to flower and adds to overall taste and charm without causing inebriation. Mahua will always feel a touch more alcoholic, as will jamoon. Cashew apples will lose their wine-like taste mighty quick, so it’s a trick to catch them if you can at the right moments, or just let them go to vinegar and be happy anyway. Knowing your ingredients helps, as does just plain old experimentation and practice.

Shrub syrups, if you consider them this way, are really off-shoots of some longer vinegar-making process, but you pause midway when the tastes are just right and decant just enough to get a nice, sharp summer drink which is more-or-less vinegary depending on the fruit and other sundry environmental factors.

On the other hand, if you do have a sudden harvest of some good fruit and a mellowing vinegar just sitting there not being used, well then that living vinegar could well be given a new life to “preserve” the fruit. Pour a cashew apple vinegar over pineapples, chunks and peels, or a jamoon vinegar over mulberries. Drain off the liquid after a day or two and there’s your shrub syrup. Follow the methods indicated for raspberry and strawberry shrub syrups in the recipes below.

Then leave the re-hydrated, re-sugared remaining fruit pulp to become a (lighter) vinegar or use it to make a jam or a chutney. Add it to a jamun ginger spice cake perhaps, or a kelakkai chutney with raisins to give Old Major Grey a run for his money.

Oh, and since “shrub” and “syrup” derive etymologically from the same root, sharaab, they’re a bit of a redundancy. The shrub is the syrup, and the syrup is the shrub. Neither are thick like maple syrups or molasses, but they are always intense in tastes–concentrates, in that sense. Thin either out with soda or ice or just cool water, and that’s the quencher you’re looking for, whatever be its name.