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Persian Sherbet
Shave some ice into the tumbler; add- Strawberry Syrup, 2 ounces.
Fill tumbler nearly full of soda water, using large stream only. Shake from handsome essence bottles- American Extract Lemon a few drops American Fruit Acid American Extract Orange, colored bright red with American Ruby Color Turn into patent shaker, and shake.
Charge 10 cents.
Chairs are a good thing; when resting, customers drink slowly. This means looking about seeing other things to buy.
A soda-fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: everything hinges on cold, on carbonation, and on a few drops of concentrated flavouring. It makes one glass.
- The tumblerFountain tumblers of this period held roughly 10 to 12 ounces. Two ounces of syrup in a 12-ounce glass packed with shaved ice gives about the sweetness of a modern Italian soda.
- "Large stream only"Commercial fountains had a coarse stream for volume and a fine stream for foam. The instruction means charge the glass fast and hard so the drink stays lively; a home siphon or a bottle of well-chilled seltzer poured briskly down the side of the glass does the same work.
- American Fruit AcidA proprietary dilute solution of citric or tartaric acid sold to fountains for sharpening sweet syrups. A few drops of fresh lemon juice, or a pinch of citric acid dissolved in water, covers the same ground.
- The "American" extractsThe repeated "American" prefix points to proprietary trade-brand goods rather than generic ones, though no supplier is named here. Ordinary lemon and orange extract are far stronger than they look on the label: two or three drops of each is the whole intent, and a scant quarter teaspoon will already overpower the strawberry.
- American Ruby ColorA fountain colouring, in this era commonly a coal-tar dye of uncertain composition. Any modern red food colouring gives the effect; the point is only that the drink should read as bright red before it reaches the customer.
- Shaved, not cubedShaved ice chills the syrup on contact and gives the drink its slushy body. Cubes leave the syrup sitting at the bottom in a heavy layer.
- The shakerA "patent shaker" was a lidded metal cup used at the fountain. Shake briefly and serve at once, since shaking drives off carbonation faster than anything else in the sequence. Shaking the syrup, acid and extracts with the ice first and adding the soda last would keep more fizz, though that is not the order given here.
The word sherbet descends through Turkish and Persian sharbat from an Arabic root meaning a drink, and by the nineteenth century it covered everything from a Middle Eastern fruit-and-sugar cordial to a fizzing powder sold to children. Fountain men borrowed the name freely: "Persian" here signals nothing about the ingredients, all of which are American factory syrups and essences, and everything about the fashion for exotic-sounding menu cards. The recipe is a fair specimen of the trade literature of the soda fountain's boom years, when dispensers could buy their syrups, acids, extracts and colours as a branded set, and such books often doubled as advertisements for the goods they named. The closing line about chairs is the giveaway that this is a business manual as much as a recipe collection: the fountain existed to draw traffic into a drug store, and a customer seated with a red drink was a customer with time to look at the shelves.