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Lemon or Orange Shrub

A preserved liqueur made from lemon and orange rinds, sugar, and rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Grate the rinds of the lemons and oranges and squeeze out the juice.

Make the shrub

  1. Combine 1 pint of juice with 1½ pounds of powdered sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. Add 1 quart of Jamaica rum and pour the mixture into a jar.

  3. Shake the jar three times daily for three weeks.

  4. Let it stand in a cool place until clear.

  5. Filter the mixture and bottle it for use.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharp acidity of the citrus juice.
Jamaica rum
Acts as the alcoholic base that preserves the mixture and carries the citrus flavour.
Seville oranges
Provide acidity and bitter aromatic oils from the juice and rinds.
Lemons
Provide acidity and bright citrus flavour from juice and rind.

The step that matters

Let it stand in a cool place until clear. Sediment from the citrus pulp and sugar settles slowly, and rushing this stage leaves the shrub cloudy. Repeated shaking over the weeks keeps the sugar dissolved and the flavours blended before settling.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar, rum):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, rum. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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