Home › The Nursery and Sick-Room › Sherbet
Sherbet
Take one pound of best powdered sugar, two ounces of carbonate of soda and three ounces of tartaric acid. Mix all thoroughly and keep in a bottle corked tight. When wanted for use, put a teaspoonful of the powder in a tumbler, add a drop of essence of lemon, fill with ice-water, stir and drink. XVII. Simple Remedies for the Sick.
EVERY family should know something of simple remedies, especially those who live far from physicians. Often some simple remedy given in time will cure, or, at least, carry the patient until permanent relief can be obtained. For this reason we give a variety of recipes collected from the best authorities, with appropriate doses, the doses given being for adults. For children's doses, see table of proportionate doses in the next section. The most of them are simple and easily procured. Castor oil is now much less used than formerly, but is too valuable in certain cases to omit.
This is a dry effervescing powder, not a frozen dessert — the fizz comes from carbonate of soda meeting tartaric acid in the glass. It still works exactly as written, provided everything stays bone dry.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeOne pound of sugar to 2 oz carbonate of soda and 3 oz tartaric acid is a weight ratio: roughly 454 g : 57 g : 85 g. Measuring these by the spoonful will throw the balance off and leave either a soapy or a sour drink.
- Carbonate of sodaIn a book of this date this most often means sodium bicarbonate — ordinary baking soda — though the term was not used consistently in period texts. Do not substitute washing soda (sodium carbonate), which appears under similar names and is not for eating.
- Tartaric acidSold in the baking or homebrew aisle and online, often as cream of tartar's stronger cousin. Citric acid behaves similarly but is less sharp by weight; tartaric gives the characteristic old-fashioned tang.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains 2-3 percent cornstarch, which is actually helpful here as an anti-caking agent. Sift the three ingredients together twice rather than stirring, or the acid and soda stay in pockets.
- Dryness is the whole trickAny moisture starts the reaction inside the bottle, and the powder goes flat and clumps. Mix on a dry day, use a dry glass jar with a tight lid, and keep a dry spoon for dipping.
- Essence of lemonIn this period this usually meant oil of lemon dissolved in alcohol, potent enough that the recipe's single drop would flavour a tumbler. Modern lemon extract is weaker, so more will be needed; add a few drops and taste.
- Yield and doseYield -- The batch comes to about 21 oz of powder. Depending on how densely the powder packs, a teaspoonful is a few grams, so the bottle yields well over a hundred servings, each containing a fraction of a gram of bicarbonate.
- Ice-water, and stir onceAdd the water and drink immediately. Left standing, the carbon dioxide escapes and what remains is sweet-sour salt water.
"Sherbet" here has nothing to do with ice cream: the word descends from the Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and in nineteenth-century Britain and America it was also used for a fizzing powder stirred into cold water. The trick of pairing an alkali with a food acid so that the drink effervesces in the glass belongs to the era of the chemist's shop, where soda powders and seidlitz powders were dispensed on much the same principle, and it survives in the sherbet sweets still sold in Britain. The bicarbonate was considered mildly antacid, and the whole thing could be kept as a dry powder in a household that had no soda fountain and, as the chapter that follows makes clear, quite possibly no nearby physician either.