Home › At the Fountain › English Sherbet
English Sherbet
One ounce claret syrup, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, juice of half a lemon, half glassful plain water ice. Mix in 8-ounce glass, fill with coarse stream, mix well, serve with spoon.
A fountain drink rather than a frozen dessert: syrup, ice and charged water built in the glass and eaten with a spoon. Two of its four ingredients need translating before you can make it.
- Claret syrupIn fountain practice this could be a sweetened, colored fruit-acid syrup imitating red Bordeaux rather than wine; other formulas used actual claret. Substitute a tart red syrup — cranberry or red grape sharpened with a little citric acid — or reduce claret with an equal weight of sugar if you want the wine version.
- Ounces are fluid ouncesOne ounce of syrup is 2 tablespoons, so the drink starts with a quarter-cup of syrup total. That is a great deal of syrup for an 8-ounce glass and will taste sweet by modern soda standards; scale back to 3/4 ounce of each if you prefer.
- Plain water iceAn unflavored ice: sugar syrup and water frozen, in texture anywhere from granular to smooth depending on how it was worked. Half a glassful means roughly 4 ounces by volume, a generous scoop. Crushed ice is not the same thing; the water ice is what gives the drink body and sweetness as it melts.
- Coarse streamFountain apparatus offered a fine stream for delicate work and a coarse stream for volume and agitation. The coarse draw was used to churn the syrup into the ice as it filled. With a siphon or seltzer bottle, pour hard down the center of the glass; with a soda gun, use the full trigger.
- Glass sizeAn 8-ounce glass fills quickly once the ice is in: with 2 ounces of syrup, the lemon juice and half a glassful of water ice, only an ounce or two of soda water will fit.
- Serve at onceMix and hand it over. The point of the drink is the contrast between the granular ice and the gas; both are gone within a few minutes, which is why the spoon comes with it.
Soda-fountain "sherbets" were drinks, not frozen desserts he word word travelled from Arabic sharbat through Persian and Turkish into English as a term for a sweetened, cooled beverage, and the fountain trade kept that older sense long after home cooks had begun using "sherbet" for something you ate with a spoon. This one straddles the line: half ice, half drink, served with a spoon. Names like "English," "Roman" or "Egyptian" attached to fountain sherbets seem to have had little to do with the ingredients; the claret syrup here is the only nod to anything English, and even that was usually an imitation. Dispensers' manuals of the period are full of such combinations, written in the clipped shorthand of a working counter.