Lynn Strong

It’s Midsummer, the longest day of the year, and my jasmine plant is loving it. I, meanwhile, am looking for simple but cooling drinks when the lowest temperature for 3 weeks is 88 F and hot chai sounds much less appealing.

I’d originally planned to write up a detailed history of sharbat and its descendants shrub and squash and switchel, with wanderings through syrup and sekanjabin and so on. But it’s been a crazy week at my paying job, with 8 of 10 people out at one time or another, and making up a proper sharbat takes more standing over the stove than I’ve been able to accomplish since before I became disabled. So I started looking for something that fit into today’s spoon drawer.

Roughly speaking, sharbat involves making a thick flavored syrup with some acid and diluting it to taste. Sharbat e sekanjabin is one of the oldest, with mint and vinegar and sometimes cucumber, used either as the base of a beverage or as dipping sauce for lettuce in its thick form. Rose and pomegranate are both popular, saffron and sandalwood are both documented too, and once the notion made it to Europe you start getting into everything from basil to watermelon to carrots (no, really — they’re sweet!) If someone has made a trendy lemonade of it, there’s a good chance someone has made sharbat of it too.

…well, maybe. I made shiso sharbat e sekanjabin the year the perilla tried to devour my whole garage. I don’t know if anyone has made shiso lemonade. But aside from that — sharbat, lemonade, and Kool-aid are all built on the same chassis: sugar, acid, flavorings, and no alcohol.

This is me, and I named both Asharan bir Chameli and his House of Jasmines after my 20 year old Maid of Orleans jasmine plant. Which is currently vividly flowering! I picked a dozen flowers this morning while watering it.

But when you’re going to make chameli ki sharbat / mogra ka sharbat / whichever jasmine varietal you have sharbat, you need a basket, not a cupped handful. One of the recipes I saw started with a unit of measure that was “about 3 gajra of mogre.” In other words, go buy three strands of freshly tied hair-ornament jasmine sambac (hopefully without preservatives or pesticides) and unweave them, and use that much to make your syrup. I’m estimating 250g of flowers is at least a hundred.

So here’s my lower-spoons versions. These don’t start with “step 1, have hundreds of fresh jasmine blossoms all in bloom on the same day.”

If your jasmine is blooming:

• A dozen jasmine blossoms, picked when unfurled (often at night or the early morning)
• Either 2 cups water or 3/4 cup water and some ice
• 2 tsp white sugar (ish — more or less sweet depending on your preference)
• Optional: A couple drops of lemon juice if you have a lemon open (but I didn’t, and it turned out quite nicely even without it)

I have a little water heater which makes 2 cups of water hit 150 F in about 90 seconds. For this application, I didn’t want the water fully boiling; I trust my plant and my keeping of it and wasn’t terribly worried about needing to sterilize the flowers the way you would for jam or most sharbats. So get your water up to green tea temperature.

With a heat safe teapot or large mug, put in the sugar and the jasmine blossoms.

Pour the hot water over it, stir it until the sugar melts, cover it, and let it steep for at least 15 minutes. (In my case, that went ‘get pulled into a string of meetings for several hours,’ by which point it was both nicely cooled and very fragrant.)

I mostly prefer room temperature drinks to cold ones, so the 2 cups hot water cooling to room temperature was fine for me to have a cooler-but-not-cold drink.

If you prefer it colder, here’s the iced variation: Stir your sugar and flowers into 3/4 cup hot water, let steep for a few, and then pour the still probably warm liquid over ice. (You want to add the sugar while the liquid is hot even if you cool it later.)

I’ve refilled my cup twice this morning and the flowers are still sweetly scenting the infusion and my room. I don’t mind gently sipping around floating flowers. If that’s a challenge for you, though, using a teapot and pouring through a strainer should take care of it.

If you don’t have a blooming jasmine at hand:

The recipe above isn’t technically a sharbat; it’s kind of a sharbat shortcut. Instead of making and then diluting syrup with acid, I just made it at the drinking concentration.

But you can buy jasmine syrups, though not as many as there used to be.

My former shortcut favorite, Monin, stopped making their cane syrup jasmine a few years ago and replaced it with honey. I have nothing at all against honey except that in this case it’s letting them shortcut on the flavor, which is now more like honey and less like jasmine itself. But if honeyed jasmine sounds great, or if Monin is what’s most accessible to you, have at it!

I haven’t yet had a chance to try Floral Elixir or Amoretti’s jasmine syrups. From the prices, I suspect that’s why Monin shifted to honey.

If you like sparkling water, using either a homemade sharbat or a syrup will get you to jasmine soda much more readily than my more dilute version too.

I haven’t done the brand research to see if there are any jasmine essential oils that I would consider food safe, and they’re so concentrated they’re really not an easy substitute for cooking extracts like vanilla and almond.

Let me know if you’d like the more detailed sharbat dive some time, or maybe a wander through the intersections of perfume and spice and cooking with flowers?