How to make a plum Shrub.

Sticky, sweet and sharp

Today’s words are for my paid subscribers, as my newsletter yesterday I instead sent at the last minute as additional free content to all of my subscribers. A gesture to say thank you to all of the new sign-ups last week.

The traffic that this twice-weekly newsletter of mine has created in the last half a year has been astonishing.

I thank all of you yet again.

Shrub.

An old-fashioned preparation of macerated fruits, sugars, aromatics and vinegar.

Historically, the origins of these cordials can be placed anywhere worldwide from the fifteenth century onwards, with variations involving rum and brandy, sweetened with sugar and flavoured with citrus zests. Early liqueurs, historical drinks mixers if you like. Similar I suppose in a way to medicinal oxymels, flavoured with herbs and honey.

Plum and aniseed Shrub

In centuries past, it was a way of using up a glut of berries, plums or soft fruits late in the summer before the onset of the colder months. I still like these old traditions, I feel there is much to learn from the past with how and what we eat. I like to think of how people would have experienced different tastes and flavours long ago in the way that we experience them today

Completely off-topic here but take for instance a cheese sandwich. If you take a slice of crumbly farmhouse cheddar, a strongly flavoured piece that bites in the sinus. Placed on a crust of freshly baked bread, spread thickly with creamy butter, perhaps topped with a pickled onion, it has a reference point for many of us. I like that it tastes the same now as it did to people hundreds of years ago. The same satisfaction in that first mouthful, where people experienced taste in exactly the same way as we do today. The flavours don’t really change. I love that. Shrubs are the same. A preparation using basic ingredients that would have been familiar to people throughout the centuries and is exactly the same today. Like tasting the past.

I like to use traditional skills in my work, I like to cook with fire and smoke. I like to salt and preserve. I’m not one for sealing things in plastic bags, and then letting them sit in water baths at fifty-three degrees Celsius to denature the proteins. I’ve seen it, done it professionally and I don’t really like it. I’m also a slight history nerd, ( I have a mudlarking licence for the river Thames, where much to the despair of my wife, I love to pick through layers of medieval history, collecting old buttons, tokens, pins, coins and bone dominos, returning home covered in a muddy crust that follows me through the house no matter how hard I try for it not to). I like that the past is relevant to us every day, no matter how far away it feels.

I digress.