Skip to main content
Drink

Strawberry Shrub

A sweetened fruit vinegar made from mashed strawberries, lemon juice, sugar, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Mash the strawberries and strain the juice through a bag.

  2. Add the strained lemon juice and bring to a fast boil.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes, then add the sugar and cook for 5 more minutes.

  4. Skim the mixture as it cools, then add the brandy when completely cold.

Bottle and store

  1. Clean the bottles by rinsing with soda water and then boiling water.

  2. Use new corks soaked in cold water, drive them into the bottles, cut off even with the top, and seal with a mixture of beeswax and rosin.

  3. Store the bottles on their sides in dry sawdust.

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

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

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and colour, and most of the juice for the shrub.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the fruit flavour.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the shrub and, with the acid, helps preserve it.
Brandy or colorless whiskey
Adds alcohol that helps preserve the shrub and carries aroma.

The step that matters

Add the brandy only when the mixture is completely cold. Alcohol added to hot syrup evaporates some of its aroma and can be lost, so cooling first keeps the spirit's flavour in the finished shrub.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes