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A Dry Rabbit original · Thanksgiving

Cranberry Cardamom Shrub

Tart and bright beside the turkey: cranberries and cardamom kept in vinegar, which is all a shrub is, lifted with orange and soda.

Alcohol-free. Nothing in it has alcohol.

Make it

You’ll need

  • 1¼ oz (37.5 ml) cranberry–cardamom shrub
  • ½ oz (15 ml) fresh orange juice
  • 4 oz (120 ml) soda water, chilled

Garnish: A strip of orange peel, and three cranberries on a pick.

Method

  1. Fill a tall glass with ice.
  2. Add the shrub and the orange juice, top it up with the soda water and lift it once with a spoon.

Rabbit’s note. A shrub is fruit and sugar kept in vinegar. The vinegar gives an alcohol-free drink the bite a spirit would, and one jar makes about 16 drinks.

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Allergens and caffeine

  • No major allergens, and no caffeine.

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The tools

The pantry

Make ahead

  • Cranberry–cardamom shrub. Crack 8 green cardamom pods with the flat of a knife. Simmer them with 2 cups of fresh or frozen cranberries, 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of water until the berries burst, about 8 minutes, and crush them lightly with a spoon. Off the heat, stir in 1 cup of apple cider vinegar. Cool, cover and refrigerate for at least a day, then strain. It's sharpest on day one and rounder by day three. Makes about 2½ cups and keeps about a month in the fridge (our estimate).

From the store

Fresh orange juice, Soda water.

Buying in person? See where to shop zero-proof around Boston.

How we checked it

Dry Rabbit originals are developed and checked with AI, against the 42 tested recipes in The Dry Rabbit Cocktail Guide: sweetness and acidity per ounce, sweet to sour, dilution and the drink’s size against drinks made the same way, every ingredient’s alcohol, and whether you can buy it. One that falls outside the book’s range is reworked before it’s published.

The check’s notes on Cranberry Cardamom Shrub

Built and topped, like the book's Bog Hopper, but the shrub does the work its tonic does: the vinegar brings the bite and the cardamom the warmth. Sweetness 0.15 and acidity 0.12 a finished ounce, sweet to sour 1.30, all inside the book's built drinks (0.05 to 0.20, 0.01 to 0.17, and 0.32 to 2.62), and 5.9 oz over ice. The shrub's numbers are our estimate (1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of cider vinegar to 2 cups of cranberries, about 2½ cups strained). ½ oz of orange juice rounds off the vinegar's edge. It shares one ingredient with any one book recipe at most. Cranberries, cardamom and cider vinegar are at every supermarket in November, and cranberries are the state's own. Made a day ahead, the shrub keeps a month, so one batch covers the season. 0.0%.

Made it? Tell us how it was: the best originals come back next season.

More to make

From our book, free on the site: The Burrow, Rabbit Punch, Harvey, Crepuscular, Winter Coat, Bog Hopper.