Mary’s cousin Colin believes he will always be ill, but Mary and Dickon bring him and his household back to life! Though this drink is non-alcoholic, I took inspiration from the John & Tom Collins, a family of drinks that sometimes called for genever as a base. Sort of a very complex strawberry-rhubarb lemonade, a nod to lemonades as one of the most important teetotal categories in drinks history.

Shrubs were a popular method of preserving fruit in New England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though almost all apple cider in those days was fermented, I saw an opportunity here to build a non-alcoholic drink reflecting this month’s historical milieu with sweet, non-alcoholic cider, cranberry shrub, and our ginger-molasses syrup, with lemon juice to bolster the acid and salt and cayenne to liven things up.