A confusion of sherbet….

How can something so simple be confusing?

What am I talking about? Well, I woke up this morning thinking about sherbet. You know the stuff I mean, the stuff that came in a long cardboard tube with a black liquorice dipper.

When I was a kid we used to pretend that they were sticks of dynamite - and was there ever anything as impossible to eat the way that you suspected it should be eaten? The tube always went soggy, the sticky black liquorice always clogged up after the first suck, and inevitably you ended up with sticky black fingers and choking on clouds of sherbet dust.

I always ended up eating the liquorice straw and then knocking back the fizzy powder straight from the tube, getting a nose full of the fine sherbet powder that made me sneeze, then almost choke as the sherbet fizzed like a firework inside my mouth.Yes, simple but confusing. I even thought it was spelt with two r’s as in Herbert until spellchecker corrected me. What a silly Sherbert Herbert I am – as we used to say in the playground.

These days those soggy paper tubes have been replaced with hygienic plastic ones and the liquorice stick now has a black plastic handle. It takes a lot of the excitement away and is so not environmentally friendly, but the sherbet itself remains as addictive as ever, a kind of confectionary coke for kids – best not to snort it though.

I always thought that sherbet was an Indian word, something that came out of the Empire, but it is actually Arabic first used in Persia around the late 1500’s to describe a drink – sharbat. Maybe that’s why going for a few pints is sometimes describes as ‘going for a sherbet or two’. In fact there seems to be a real muddle around just what sherbet actually is.

It is either:

1. A frozen fruit-flavoured mixture, but with milk, egg white, or gelatine added. No – that’s an ice cream.
2. A drink made of sweetened fruit juice and diluted with water and ice. Isn’t that a Slush Puppy?
3. A frozen fruit or vegetable purée, served either between courses to cleanse the palate or as a desert. I’d call that a water-ice.
4. A fruit flavoured slightly effervescent powder, eaten as a sweet or used to make a drink.

That’s the one! We got there at last. See I told you it was confusing. I can’t even find out who invented it. The Emperor Nero is said to have invented some sort of sherbet but I bet that was of the Slush-Puppy variety, so I can only assume that whoever invented the sherbet for dib-dabs, lemon sherbets, flying saucers, liquorice flyers, and of course the sherbet fountain wanted to remain anonymous, maybe he was sherbet shy.

I was going to try making some but as yet I haven’t been able to track down any dried acidic acid or any tartaric and these, along with bicarbonate of soda and castor sugar, are pretty much all it takes. As I said - how can something so simple be confusing?