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Southern Sherbet
One ounce claret syrup, 1 ounce pineapple syrup, ¼ ounce lime juice. Serve in 8-ounce mineral with cracked ice and top off with sundae pineapple. Simple Syrup is the basis of all soda water syrups and the formula for making it is given in this book.
A single fountain drink, built to order in the glass. The measures are fluid ounces and the whole thing comes to well under a cup of syrup before ice and garnish.
- The glassAn "8-ounce mineral" is a fountain glass of 8 fl oz capacity, commonly footed. Any tall 8-10 oz tumbler works; the drink is meant to be mostly ice.
- Ounces are liquid ounces1 oz is 2 tablespoons, so the claret and pineapple syrups are 2 tablespoons each. The ¼ oz of lime juice is 1½ teaspoons — a small amount, but it is what keeps the two sweet syrups from cloying.
- Claret syrupFountain claret syrup was a red, grape-and-spice flavoured syrup meant to suggest Bordeaux; some formulas used actual claret, others grape juice, colouring and acid. Nothing sold under that name today is standard, so a grape or black-currant syrup with a squeeze of lemon is the closest substitute.
- Sundae pineappleThis is crushed pineapple packed in heavy syrup, the ready-made topping kept in a jar at the fountain. Canned crushed pineapple drained of most of its juice and stirred with a spoonful of simple syrup gives the same effect.
- Cracked, not cubedCracked ice is what makes a fountain sherbet drinkable through a straw and dilutes it as it sits. Cubes will leave the syrup base sitting undiluted at the bottom.
- No soda called forThe recipe as written is a syrup-and-ice drink, not a carbonated one. If you want it long, top with 4-5 oz of plain soda water before adding the pineapple.
- YieldOne drink. Scaling up is a matter of multiplying; build each glass separately so the ice ratio holds.
"Sherbet" at the American soda fountain had drifted a long way from the Arabic sharba by way of Persian and then Turkish sharbet, a chilled sweetened fruit drink. By the early twentieth century the fountain trade used the word loosely for a cold, acidulated fruit-syrup drink served over cracked ice, distinct from both the frozen ice and the ice-cream soda. Claret syrup belongs to a whole family of fountain flavours — claret, port, sherry, rum, brandy — that borrowed the names and rough flavour profiles of alcoholic drinks without necessarily containing any, a habit that served dispensers well in dry counties and, after 1920, everywhere. The "Southern" in the name is probably marketing rather than geography: fountain manuals of the period seem to have attached regional and society names to formulas so that a soda jerk had something to call the drink on the price card.