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Arctic Sherbet
Make a sherbet of 10 ounces pineapple syrup, 10 ounces strawberry syrup, 10 ounces vanilla syrup, 2 to 3 ounces orange essence, ½ ounce solution of citric acid. Serve by filling a large mineral water glass one-third full of shaved ice, add 1½ ounces of the above syrup, fill the glass with the coarse stream, stir well and serve with straws.
This is a fountain "sherbet" — a blended flavoring syrup, not a frozen dessert — mixed to order with shaved ice and soda water. All the ounces are fluid ounces.
- What the recipe actually yieldsThe syrup blend comes to roughly 32½–33½ fl oz, a bit over a quart. At 1½ oz per glass that is about twenty-two drinks, so scale it down unless you are serving a crowd.
- The citric acid solution is ambiguousFountain manuals of the period assumed a house stock solution of citric acid dissolved in hot water, but strengths varied widely and this book does not specify. Mix your own, note the ratio, and add it to the finished syrup a little at a time, tasting — it is mainly there to cut the sweetness.
- Orange essence has changed"Essence" here meant a relatively dilute alcoholic tincture of orange oil. Modern orange extract and especially orange oil are far stronger; 2–3 ounces of either would swamp the drink. Start with a teaspoon or two of extract per quart of syrup and work up.
- Coarse streamFountain draft arms offered a fine stream (a needle jet, for building foam) and a coarse stream (full flow of plain carbonated water). Substitute cold seltzer poured briskly down the side of the glass; the point is volume and turbulence to mix the syrup, not maximum fizz.
- Large mineral water glassProbably in the 10–12 oz range. With one-third shaved ice and 1½ oz syrup that leaves roughly 6 oz for soda, which is the ratio to keep if you use a different glass.
- Shaved ice, not cubesShaved or finely crushed ice chills instantly and lets the syrup disperse as you stir. Cubes will leave a sweet layer at the bottom and a watery top.
- Syrup keepingThese are sugar-saturated syrups and the citric acid lowers the pH further, but the blend is still best made in small quantity and refrigerated. Fruit syrups cloud and ferment once diluted or left warm.
At a turn-of-the-century soda fountain, "sherbet" often meant something other than a frozen dessert — one sense among several, alongside the frozen fruit sherbets and water ices already well established at the same date, it named a tart, fruit-flavored blended syrup served long with ice and carbonated water, closer in spirit to the Middle Eastern sharbat from which the word descends than to the ice cream case. The dispenser's stock in trade was a rack of single-flavor syrups plus a bottle of citric acid solution, and his skill lay in combinations like this one: pineapple, strawberry and vanilla rounded with orange and sharpened with acid to keep the whole thing from tasting merely sugary. Names were part of the sale, and cold-evoking labels — Arctic, Polar, Klondike — plausibly appealed in an era when a genuinely icy drink in July was still a small marvel, worth advertising on the wall behind the marble counter. "Frappé," for its part, denoted a drink category served over shaved ice rather than simply a cold-sounding name.