شراب

Sharāb is the Arabic word for drink, from the root sh-r-b (to drink). The same root gives English the words syrup (via Latin sirupus from Arabic sharāb) and sherbet (via Turkish and Persian). In the medieval Arab world, sharāb referred to any prepared drink, often sweetened fruit syrups diluted with water. The Crusaders and Mediterranean traders brought these drinking syrups back to Europe, where the word was anglicized to 'shrub.'

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, shrub meant a preserved fruit syrup mixed with spirits — usually rum or brandy. Citrus fruits too expensive to eat fresh could be preserved in sugar and vinegar, then mixed with alcohol. The drink was common on ships, where the vinegar and sugar preserved the fruit long after it would have rotted. English sailors drank shrubs for the same reason they drank lime juice: scurvy prevention dressed up as pleasure.

Colonial Americans made shrubs from whatever fruit they had. Benjamin Franklin's papers contain a recipe. The drink served two purposes: it preserved summer fruit for winter, and it made questionable water safe to drink. Apple cider vinegar, raspberry or peach, sugar, and time. The vinegar did the preserving. The sugar made it palatable. By the mid-nineteenth century, the temperance movement produced non-alcoholic versions — fruit, vinegar, and sugar without the rum.

Shrub disappeared in the twentieth century, killed by refrigeration and commercial soft drinks. It returned around 2010 when craft cocktail bartenders rediscovered it. A shrub is now a $12 ingredient in a $16 cocktail. The Arabic word for 'drink' traveled through Crusader ports, English rum ships, colonial farmsteads, and temperance halls before arriving at a cocktail bar in Brooklyn. The journey took eight centuries.