Unearthed at Russ & Daughters during a 40-minute Sunday morning wait for bagel sandwiches: an old-fashioned beverage that was new to me. For the last five years I’ve been intending to recreate this 2010-era New York Times recipe, itself a recreation of a turn-of-the-century cooling beverage. Each year I’m put off by the cost of fresh berries and end up lazily gobbling up any batches I manage to get my hands on. Then, serendipitously, on the first truly cold day of an encroaching winter, I found a ready-made version. Shrub, as it turns out, is just another term for drinking vinegar, with which its sharp bitter notes piercing velvety sweetened vegetable juice proves the perfect complement for the taste of smoked fish. The beet and lemon mixture seems to cement the beverage’s Old World bonafides, apparently isolating its derivation as either the LES itself or one of the Eastern European origin points which once funneled so many new immigrants into this crowded area. This seemingly clear-cut explanation is of course confused by the fact that Russ and Daughters sits squarely at the nexus of genuine old-fashioned conservationism and tongue-in-cheek modernization. The sandwich I ordered, for example, was called the ‘Super Heebster’ and featured wasabi flying fish roe atop baked salmon and whitefish salad. So while shrub may have once been favored by shtetl dwellers ready for refreshment after a long day of potato picking or wheat sheaving, it’s path from the old world to the new was likely much more complicated, tracing back through Colonial America, the Caribbean, Britain and the Middle East. The name, which hints at its botanic roots purely by accident, comes from the Hindi sharbat, an aromatic syrup whose name itself comes from the Arabic shurb, for drink. This is also the origin point for sherbet, the oft-mispronounced dessert that’s also a completely unrelated British sweet), all of these things drawing from their origin from a Turkish adaptation of the Arabic word. As you can see from the number of mini digressions I’ve already tumbled into, the history is plenty knotty. That entanglement only worsens when you get into shrubs themselves, which at this point in time denote two completely separate drink traditions. First is the older, now extinct alcohol-based British version, which combines citrus-preserved fruit (or just plain juice) with rum or brandy as part of a punch. The use of rum here indicates some new-world influence was already at work. This fully takes hold in the non-boozy American version, which started as a rejuvenating labor beverage birthed in the heat of the Caribbean and/or the Southern colonies. This version of the shrub is closely related to the Switchel (a.k.a. Haymaker’s Punch), which can be imagined as its fruit-free counterpart. Both are primarily identified by the use of vinegar as a preserving agent, for which reason the drinks largely fell out of favor with the invention of modern refrigeration, returning to wider public consciousness only now that all that’s old and artisanal has come back into fashion. Whatever the excuse for its return, I celebrated the discovery by quickly brewing up a batch of Shrub for Thanksgiving, baking some extra cranberries, then macerating them in sugar, with apple cider vinegar as a stabilizer. Paired with seltzer and gin, the drink made for a nice fizzy accompaniment to the hard labor that is Thanksgiving dinner.
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