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Pineapple Phosphate Sherbet
One pint pineapple juice, 1½ pints water, 11/½ pints plain syrup, lemon juice, ½ lemon, ½ ounce citric acid (sol.) Mix and freeze.
A fountain sherbet built from the same components a dispenser already had at hand: fruit juice, simple syrup, and a bottle of acid solution for tartness. The proportions are workable, but two of the quantities need reading carefully before you scale anything.
- The garbled measurement"11/½ pints plain syrup" is a typesetting failure. Read as 1½ pints, which matches the water and gives a balanced sherbet; 11 pints of syrup to a pint of juice would be nonsense.
- Plain syrupFountain "plain syrup" or simple syrup was heavier than what most people make today; period formulas vary, but they generally call for considerably more sugar per volume of water than a modern 1:1 syrup. Substituting 1:1 will leave the mix lower in sugar and more prone to freezing hard.
- Citric acid (sol.)Not dry crystals but the fountain's stock solution of citric acid in water; the strength varied from house to house, so half an ounce is a small splash rather than a fixed dose. Using half an ounce of powdered acid instead would be aggressively sour.
- The missing amount"Lemon juice, ½ lemon" is the whole of it: the juice of half a lemon, roughly 1 tablespoon. The comma makes it look like two separate ingredients.
- Pineapple juiceThe acidity and sweetness of pineapple juice varies a good deal. Taste the mix cold before freezing and hold back some of the acid solution if it is already sharp.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-crank freezer packed in ice and rock salt. In a modern machine, chill the mixture thoroughly first, then churn; with no fat in the mix, churning matters more than it would for ice cream.
- YieldAbout four pints of liquid, so roughly 2 quarts of sherbet before allowing for any air churned in.
At the soda fountain, "phosphate" meant a drink dosed with acid phosphate, an acid preparation based on phosphoric acid that gave a dry, mineral bite quite unlike lemon. The name stuck to the style loosely, and here the sourness is actually supplied by citric acid solution, the other bottle on the fountain's acid shelf. Frozen sherbets like this one belonged to the fountain rather than the kitchen: the soda man already stocked fruit juice, heavy plain syrup and acid in measured bottles, so a sherbet could be assembled from the same inventory as the glass of pineapple phosphate he had just poured. The practice of selling ices alongside carbonated drinks is generally traced to the American drugstore fountain of the later nineteenth century, which grew from a dispensary counter into a full soda and ice cream trade.