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Moorish Sherbet
Shaved Ice, ½ tumblerful; Strawberry Syrup, 2 ounces; Pineapple Syrup, 2 ounces; Vanilla Syrup, 2. Milk sufficient to fill tumbler.
Shake well, add soda water, fine stream, and pour from tumbler to shaker several times. Serve in a 14-ounce tumbler with straws. Don't forget that soda is not like an ordinary purchase. People require some things, but they must be tempted to soda.
A soda-fountain drink built in the glass and aerated by pouring, not a frozen sherbet. Everything hinges on how the soda water meets the milk.
- The fine streamCharged water hitting milk hard can curdle it, the more so with two fruit syrups already in the glass. Draw the soda slowly against the inside of the tumbler and keep the drink cold throughout.
- Ounces means fluid ouncesTwo ounces of syrup is a quarter cup. The three syrups together come to six ounces, which is about 3/4 cup of sweetener in a 14-ounce glass — very sweet by current taste, and worth cutting to an ounce each on a first attempt.
- Fountain syrupsThese were generally much heavier than the thin coffee syrups sold now: a cooked sugar syrup flavored with fruit juice or extract. Modern snow-cone or Italian-soda syrups are the closest substitute; strawberry preserves thinned with hot water also works.
- Shaved ice, half a tumblerfulShaved, not cubed — it chills instantly and dilutes as it goes. Half of a 14-ounce tumbler is roughly 7 ounces by volume of finely crushed ice. Cubes will not incorporate during the pouring.
- Pouring from tumbler to shakerThis is the fountain equivalent of throwing a drink: three or four passes between vessels held well apart, which aerates the milk and gives the head. It is doing the work a blender would do, so do not skip it.
- YieldOne 14-ounce drink. Straws are not decorative here — the foam sits on top and the syrup settles, so a straw reaches the bottom.
- The last sentenceNot an instruction. It is trade advice to the dispenser, of the kind these manuals scattered between formulas.
The word sherbet comes through Turkish from Arabic sharbat, a sweetened fruit drink, and by the late nineteenth century American fountain men appear to have used it loosely for cold, sweet, fruit-flavored drinks, frozen or not. "Moorish" reads as an exotic label attached to a formula with no particular connection to the place. What is notable is the milk: fountains were moving beyond plain fruit-and-soda into milk drinks around this period, and pouring between vessels was one way to froth them before electric drink mixers came into use.