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Rose Sherbet
One pint vanilla syrup, 1 pint pineapple syrup, 1 pint orange syrup, 4 ounces sherry wine, 2 ounces prepared grape juice. Dispense 1½ ounces in mineral glass with crushed ice.
This is a fountain formula, not a single drink: you are compounding a bottle of flavoring syrup that gets drawn off an ounce and a half at a time. Read it as a batch recipe and it makes sense.
- What is missingThe instruction stops at ice because the glass would then be filled from the carbonated water draft. Without soda water you have a spoonful of sweet syrup on ice.
- YieldThree pints of syrup plus the wine and juice comes to 54 ounces, or 36 servings at 1½ ounces each. Scale down by eight if you want a few drinks rather than a shift's worth.
- Mineral glassThe fountain glass used for mineral (carbonated) water. Any highball glass works; the point is headroom for the foam.
- Fountain syrupsThese were heavy simple syrups, about 2 parts sugar to 1 part water by weight, flavored with extract or fruit juice. Modern coffee-bar syrups are thinner and will give a weaker, less clinging drink.
- Prepared grape juiceUnfermented bottled grape juice, the pasteurized commercial product that had been on shelves since the 1890s. Plain 100% grape juice is the nearest thing.
- The sherryFour ounces in 54 is about seven percent of the compounded syrup, so each 1½-ounce serve carries roughly a ninth of an ounce of sherry — a trace once the glass is filled with soda. It is a flavoring, not a spirit measure, and a dry or medium sherry keeps the syrup from going flat and candied.
- No rose in itThe formula contains no rose water or rose extract; the reason for the name is not stated. Do not add either; it will read as perfume against the pineapple.
- Keeping itSugar at fountain strength is fairly self-preserving, but the wine and juice cut that. Refrigerate the compounded syrup and use it within a week or two; watch for cloudiness.
"Sherbet" at the American soda fountain meant something quite different from the frozen dessert: it was a class of sweet, acidulated, fruit-flavored draft drinks, and the word traces back through Turkish and Persian to the Arabic sharbat, a chilled sweetened drink. Fountain manuals of this period are full of them, generally organized as compound syrups the dispenser mixed up in quantity and kept in labeled bottles under the marble counter, because speed at the taps was the whole business. The dash of sherry is worth noting — before Prohibition, wine and even brandy appeared routinely in fountain formulas alongside the temperance drinks they were nominally competing with, and the druggist who owned the fountain generally had both in stock anyway. Formulas like this one, built from three ready-made syrups plus two flavoring liquids, show how far the trade had moved toward pre-manufactured components rather than making everything from fruit.