Pia Cook’s Curious Cabinet filled with award-wining drinks

When Pia Cook was pregnant, a magazine article set her on the path to an award-winning business idea.
By Cam Ward, published in the Geelong Advertiser, 7 October, 2023.

IT is said that necessity is the mother of invention. In Pia Cook’s case, however, her impending motherhood was the necessity for invention.

One festive season, a pregnant Pia – having sworn off cocktails – was sick of drinking soda water, or lemon, lime, and bitters. That’s when she chanced upon a magazine article about a type of drink known as “shrubs” and her life took off on a new direction.

In 2019 she launched The Curious Cabinet and her own range of shrubs. Today they are stocked in some 150 stores around Australia.

Essentially a fruit syrup, shrubs have their origins in the days before refrigeration, when preserving fresh fruit and vegetables was a way of life.

According to the Atlas Obscura website, in addition to preserving their fruit with sugar and vinegar, colonial Americans added cold water to the mix to make a refreshing summer beverage. They called the combination a shrub, from sharab, an Arabic word for “drink.” Medieval Iranian texts describe a beverage known as sekanjabin, which mixed sugar, vinegar and fresh mint with water.

“The description of vinegar, sugar and fruit really appealed to my pregnant tastebuds,” Pia laughs from the upstairs space at The Curious Cabinet factory in Breakwater.

“I just researched what they were and how to make them, tinkered around and that’s how it all started.”While learning the process of making shrubs, Pia says what she developed is quite different from what’s in the textbooks. That is, in part, a nod to her background.

Pia got a Masters of Museum Management in 2004. As part of learning art history, she came across the concept of cabinets of curiosities, pieces of furniture or entire rooms that the well-to-do would fill with objects of interest as a means of demonstrating how widely travelled and broad in knowledge they were.

Pia was intrigued by what drove different people to collect different things. In much the same way, Pia has opted for different flavour combinations in her own Curious Cabinet.

“The name’s broad enough for me to produce anything. I didn’t know where it would lead and what my ideas would be,” she says.

“I’m thankful for that winding road that led me here. And I get to be creative in this role.

“I still wear a lot of hats, I’m still in the kitchen sometimes, but I do have an amazing production team now. They just have to try and rein me in because I’ve always got lots of ideas about what we can do next.”

Until 2022, The Curious Cabinet operated from the kitchen table in her Geelong West home where she and her family were “ living amongst towers of mandarins down the hallway, peaches in the office”.

The Curious Cabinet produces six shrubs at the moment — mandarin, rhubarb, lime, white peach, dark cherry and strawberry.

Mandarin is clearly the most popular — when gt meets Pia, she and her team are getting ready to work through 400kg of mandarins on site at the factory — lime is taking off after being launched this year but rhubarb is the one that people are most passionate about. And that includes Pia herself.

“I think rhubarb lovers love anything to do with rhubarb. That’s a top seller and the closest to my heart because it’s the first one I made,” she explains.

“All of them work beautifully with gin, for example. A lot of gin distilleries have taken them on because they’re an alternative to tonic.”

Pia names Bellarine Distillery and Anther Distillery as her biggest advocates. Anther co-owner Dervilla McGowan even introduced Pia to the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria (RBGV), following a collaboration between Anther and the RBGV last year in Anther’s Florescence gin.

Dervilla recommended The Curious Cabinet’s range as a non-alcoholic product for the RBGV’s customers and the response was so positive that Curious Cabinet and the RBGV are now doing their own collaboration, featuring botanicals from the Gardens, with 5 per cent of proceeds to go to the Gardens.

Pia is proud of her company’s low-waste philosophy across the board; she says the aim is to “keep it to pips and stalks”. Fruit used to flavour the shrubs is then used in either products, incorporated in jams and chutneys or freeze dried and powdered into dust for sprinkling on desserts or cocktails.

Not surprisingly, The Curious Cabinet was honoured at the 2023 Clean and Conscious Awards, where its spiced rhubarb chutney took home a bronze medal. There was also a gold, four silvers and a bronze at the 2023 Royal Tasmanian Fine Food Awards.