Spiced lemonade aka shikanji

Sweet, sour, savoury, funky, and exceptionally addictive

Hello, my name is Apoorva Sripathi and I’m a writer, editor, and artist. This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for lemonade, which is also a cross between Indian shikanji and Persian sekanjabin. I hope you’ll give it a go. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. You can also follow 💌shelfoffering on Instagram. Thank you!

I always resist rigidity in my recipes – I think that one should comfortably play around with ingredients and figure out what works for you. But context matters. Without it, there is no meaning to a dish: not just as an instruction or a reproduction but also as a definition of its past, present, and future on and off the plate.

In The Recipe Reader, authors Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster write about how recipes in their contexts are an important form of cultural expression. Recipes can build identities and perspectives – they can also help in constructing nation-states. They are the theory to the practice of experiencing a nation or a people’s cuisine in our everyday lives.

The context for today’s recipe, shikanji or shikanjvi which is a spiced lemon water, comes from Punjab, which in turn borrows from the sekanjabin, a traditional and ancient sweet and sour Persian syrup. Sekanjabin is one among the many syrups from Iran, like the sharbat for example, and derives its name from the Arabic for vinegar and honey which is what this syrup is primarily made up of. A sekanjabin is also sometimes served as a dipping sauce for lettuce.

Shikanji, on the other hand, is a spiced lemonade substituting vinegar for lemon and is popular in many parts of India, particularly Punjab and Delhi. Water is seasoned with the juice of lemons and spiced with sugar, cumin, black pepper, and black salt. It is effectively an oral rehydration solution (but obviously please don’t take it to mean medically) with more salt than sugar. I’ve taken inspiration from the shikanji recipe in Classic Cooking of Punjab and combined it with the sekanjabin recipe by Candice who runs the food blog Proportional Plate. As always, make it to your taste – adjust the sugar and the lemon, add and/or omit spices, and drink it piled with ice on a hot day.

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💌 My art is available for purchase here – I currently have 10 prints of leafy cabbage in both portrait and landscape on A5 cards. My A4 heirloom tomato print is currently sold out, but if you’d like a print please send me a message!

💌 I also offer editorial consultations and am open to editing anything you’re looking to self-publish. In case you need a refresher on my skills, I’ve edited the self-published cookbook Sindh: Stories and Recipes from a Forgotten Land, which has now been picked up by Harper Collins India. I also am the co-founder and editor of chlorophyll, a literary magazine , as well as the co-founder of CHEESE, the magazine of culture. You can get in touch/book here.