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Persian Sherbet, as Sold in the Shops
Mix two ounces of bicarbonate of soda with two ounces of tartaric acid, and four ounces of powdered loaf sugar. Flavour the mixture with thirty drops of the essence of lemon, and add two or three drops of any slight perfume. Keep the powder in a closely-stoppered bottle. When wanted for use, mix a tea-spoonful in half a tumbler of water.
An effervescent drink powder rather than a frozen dessert: acid and alkali sit dry in the bottle and fizz when they meet water. Almost everything that can go wrong is about moisture and about what you use for the flavouring.
- "Any slight perfume"In Victorian usage this meant a food essence — orange-flower water, neroli, rose, a drop of vanilla — of the kind sold by the same chemist who sold the tartaric acid. It does not mean modern cosmetic perfume, which is not food and must never go into anything you drink. If you cannot buy the flavouring as a food-grade essence, leave it out; the lemon carries the powder on its own.
- Weights, not spoonsTwo ounces is about 57 g, four ounces about 113 g. The 1:1 ratio of bicarbonate of soda to tartaric acid is what makes it fizz, so weigh these rather than measuring by volume — the two powders have very different densities.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone and crushed at home. Caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent; ordinary granulated sugar ground briefly in a spice mill also works. Do not use icing sugar, which contains cornflour and clouds the glass.
- Dryness is the hingeAny trace of damp starts the reaction in the bottle and the powder goes flat and cakes solid. Dry the sugar and the mixing bowl thoroughly, work on a dry day if you can, and use a glass bottle with a ground or well-sealed stopper rather than a screw jar with a paper liner.
- Essence of lemonThis was lemon oil dissolved in alcohol. Thirty drops into eight ounces of powder is assertive but not excessive; modern lemon extracts vary in strength, so add half, taste a spoonful in water, and adjust.
- Taste and sodiumBicarbonate plus tartaric acid leaves sodium tartrate behind, which gives the drink a faintly saline, mineral finish — the same note as old-fashioned seltzer powders. A teaspoon of the mixture carries roughly a gram of bicarbonate, so it is not a drink for anyone watching sodium closely. Citric acid in place of tartaric gives a rounder, more lemonade-like result.
- Yield and servingAbout 8 oz (225 g) of powder, or something on the order of fifty level teaspoons. Half a Victorian tumbler is 4–5 fl oz; stir in the powder and drink at once, since the fizz is gone within a minute or two.
Sherbet reached English through Turkish şerbet and Arabic sharbat, a sweetened, often flower- or fruit-scented drink; the same root gives us sorbet and syrup. By the middle of the nineteenth century the word had been attached in Britain to a purely chemical novelty — a dry acid-and-alkali powder that turned a glass of water into something fizzy at a time when bottled aerated waters were still a shopkeeper's luxury. Cassell's title, "as Sold in the Shops", is the point of the entry: this is a household copy of a proprietary packet, of a piece with the book's habit of reverse-engineering commercial goods, and it belongs to the same family of effervescent powders as Seidlitz and soda powders sold by chemists. The powder outlived the drink; sherbet in a British sweetshop still means a fizzing mixture of sugar, bicarbonate and a food acid.