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Oriental Sherbet
Mineral glass half full crushed ice, 1 ounce sherbet syrup, ½ ounce red orange syrup. Fill with soda and serve with straws.
A fountain build rather than a cooked recipe: ice, two syrups, carbonated water. The whole thing rests on the syrups, neither of which is sold under those names now.
- The mineral glassA soda glass of the fountain trade, heavier than a household tumbler and made to take the shock of a carbonated stream; sizes varied. A highball glass will stand in; fill it half full of crushed ice.
- Sherbet syrupFountain "sherbet" was not frozen dessert but a sweet-acid syrup, generally built on lemon or pineapple with tartaric or citric acid and often a little bicarbonate to make it lively on the tongue. A modern stand-in is a lemon syrup sharpened with citric acid to taste.
- Red orange syrupMost likely an orange syrup tinted red rather than blood orange as we would mean it today. Period fountains coloured with cochineal or coal-tar reds; a plain orange syrup gives much the same flavour without the colour.
- Ounce measuresFountain syrups were commonly pumped by measured stroke, and 1 ounce and half an ounce are 2 tablespoons and 1 tablespoon. An ounce and a half of syrup in a glass this size is drier than most modern flavoured sodas.
- "Fill with soda"Draw a short coarse stream first to lift and mix the syrups, then top with fine stream to build the head. With a bottle or siphon, pour the first third fast against the syrup, the rest slowly down the side.
- Crushed, not cubedCrushed ice chills fast and mixes more readily with the incoming stream, which is why the build calls for it.
- YieldOne glass, served immediately with straws. It flattens within a few minutes, so it is made to order and not batched.
The word travelled a long way before it reached a marble counter in America: Persian and Turkish sharbat, itself generally traced back to Arabic, gave English both "sherbet" and "sorbet," and by the nineteenth century "sherbet" in the English-speaking trade could mean an effervescent acid-and-sugar preparation as well as a cooling drink or a frozen ice. American fountain dispensers inherited that sense, and "sherbet syrup" was understood as a tart lemon-type base. The "Oriental" in the name is decoration of a familiar sort: fountain menus of the period leaned hard on exotic-sounding titles, and drinks called Egyptian, Turkish, Persian and Oriental proliferated. What the recipe really records is the economics of the counter, where a handful of stock syrups in fixed pump measures could be recombined into a menu of dozens.