A Double Shot of Sherbet

Now that I’m almost into my dotage—it will begin as soon as my kids realize what an old fool I am—I can start talking about the good old days.

Remember when ice cream just cost a nickel a scoop?

It’s hard to imagine in this day of Ben & Jerry’s, Oberweis and Cold Stone Creamery that ice cream was ever so cheap that a kid could buy a scoop with money he found under the couch cushions. Not a lot of money either.

One coin would do.

Things started to go sour with the arrival of Häagen Dazs which, delicious though it was, slapped a premium price onto ice cream which sellers have been loathe to back away from ever since. Granted, ice cream has gotten a lot more interesting, exotic and just plain better since then.  Yet, strangely, no one ever complained about ice cream not tasting good when I was a kid.

As for today’s kids, well, don’t get me started.

The 5 cent ice cream place I used to frequent, now gone, was a Thrifty drug store. It didn’t have a lot of flavors, but there were enough for us.  If you wanted a triple scoop, it set you back all of 15 cents, but I don’t remember ever pushing the envelope that hard.

I knew my place.

The ice cream scoop they used at the Thrifty was unlike any I have ever seen, before or since. It looked more like a short-barreled elephant gun. Complete with a pistol grip and a trigger mechanism, it shot 2 inch cylinder-shaped servings of ice cream or, in my case, sherbet into a cone.

I really liked their orange sherbet and ordered it a lot, especially when they didn’t have rainbow. Orange was my favorite flavor even then. The tart sweetness of it. The pulpy goodness. I didn’t get up to Thrifty much during orange season (winter, in case you didn’t know) but I sure enjoyed that sherbet in the summer.

School was out then and walking up to the Peninsula Center to buy candy and ice cream seemed like a pretty good way for a kid to spend his time. That and whatever loose change he could find laying around the house.

Good sherbet.

Only we didn’t call it sherbet. It was sher-BERT. The r being not so much silent as invisible.

Sherbet is a lot like sorbet, essentially a frozen juice. The difference is that sherbet has milk in it and the accompanying fats keep the ice crystals from getting too large.

The sherbet I made this week was not extremely easy (no cooking at all), it was really smooth too. And better by far than any sorbet I’ve ever made. I brought it to a party in Chicago this weekend and it was all gone by the time we left. So it must have been pretty good.

My eldest actually said it was the best yet.

The only question now is whether I need to invite all the neighborhood kids over to share it with me.

You know, to get them off my lawn.

Orange Sherbet
(about 2 quarts)
4 cups orange juice
1⅓ cup sugar
1 t lemon juice
½ t orange extract
3 cups milk

1. Blend all ingredients in a bowl and chill.
2. Place bowl in your freezer until ice crystals start to form.
3. Transfer the mixture into your ice cream freezer and freeze. (35 minutes did it for me.)
4. Put the frozen sorbet into the freezer for a couple of hours to give it the chance to firm up.

NOTE:     When freezing ice cream, you need to use an ice cream freezer to ensure that a certain amount of air is mixed into the frozen cream. This gives it a lighter, less icy consistency. When freezing sorbet, you may also freeze it in a popsicle mold, a bowl or on a sheet pan. Be sure to stir the mixture occasionally to limit the size of the ice particles. Larger chunks of ice make for granita, miniscule chunks make for a nice smooth sorbet (an ice cream freezer is ideal).

Photo Credit: “Scoop Shooter,” the original Thrifty scoop on a bed of Sherbet. 

As far as ice cream parlors from the old days, I know of Fosselman’s in South Pasadena, CA. My high school friend went to Applegate Farms in Clifton, NJ. Baskin Robbins was the family option for some, including my wife and I. Where did you go to get ice cream when you were a kid? And when did I turn into Andy Rooney?