Agua Fresca 26: “The Sweet Ones Become Pomegranate Sherbet”
In her informative and delightful book, Sufi Cuisine (2005), Nevin Halici, one of Turkey’s leading culinary historians, gives a recipe for pomegranate sherbet: a cup of freshly squeezed juice, 2/3 cup sugar, and 3-1/3 cups of water. Apart from her useful advice to to “roll an uncut fresh pomegrante underfoot on the floor” before squeezing it, it’s essentially the same recipe that I gave for a Mexican agua fresca de granada (pomegrante) a few days ago.
Now to Americans a sherbet usually means an icecream, an icecream that is rather less rich than the custard-based ones and often based on fruit, though recipes vary a good bit. So the question is what’s the link between ice creams, Turkish sherbet drinks, and Mexican agua frescas?
Luckily the food historians Alan Davidson and Laura Mason dug out many of the connections–though not the Mexican link–and they are laid out in the article on sherbet in the Oxford Companion to Food.
Let’s jump back about a thousand years. At that time the Arabic word for a cold, sweet, non-alcoholic drink often based on fruits was sharâb. The Spanish and the Italians, impressed with Islamic cuisine, picked this up and it moved into European languages as the French sirop and the English syrup.
Meantime, the meaning of sharâb was shifting in Arabic to include alcoholic drinks (a meaning it apparently still has in Turkish and Syrian Arabic). Whoops. So in the later Middle Ages a new word for the non-alcoholic drink entered the lexicon, sharbât. If you go to English-language Middle Eastern cook books, you’ll find a plenitude of these sherbets, like Nevin Halici’s pomegranate sherbet.
Once more the Europeans picked it up, it being the origin of the Italian sorbetto, the French sorbet, and the English sherbet. Since these drinks were served cool, the name became applied indifferently to iced fruit drinks and drinkable ices (and in England to certain kinds of candy or confectionery as well, but that’s another story).
But what about the Mexicans and their aguas frescas? Well, the syrup-sherbet vocabulary just simply isn’t around in Mexican Spanish (except for the verb sorber, to sip). They use terms such as agua fresca or agua de sabor (flavored water). For syrups, they use almíbar (obviously a term with Arabic origins) or miel (honey) as in miel de agave (agave syrup).
So my suspicion is that the Spanish who arrived in Mexico had never picked up the sherbet terminology which was developing only as the Moors were being expelled from Spain. They did, however, bring with them the idea of flavored non-alcoholic drinks which still remain such an important part of the drink landscape in Mexico.
All of which just simply raises dozens of new questions to follow up on the agua fresca trail. Why did sherbets figure so largely in Islam and who drank them? Was it in Islam that these drinks originated? How far did they penetrate into Europe? And so on.
And the quote that titles this post? That’s a quotation from the Mesnevi, one of the major works of the 13th century Muslim Sufi poet and mystic, Mevlana Jalal al Din Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi Order of Sufism. More of him too.
Sharab/Sherbet story is fascinating Rachel. In India also sharab now stands for alcoholic drinks and sharbat stands for non-alcoholic drinks.
In Mexico the word “jarabe” (hahr-AH-bay) is commonly used to refer to a syrup or concentrated sweetener.
The Spanish seemed to iced their drinks from an early date. By the 17th century Henry Stubbe’s (1662) “The Indian Nectar, or, a Discourse Concerning Chocolata” mentions that the Spanish ice their chocolate drink. So I’m not sure why it didn’t make its way to the New World.
Rajagopal, Thanks. I’m hoping for lots of input from you as this thread moves away from just Mexico and on to the world scene.
Bob, dead right. I have the feeling that jarabe is most often used for medicinal syrups, almíbar for the syrup in which fruit is preserved (those peaches from Cristalita in Irapuato are heavenly, forget Dole cans), and miel for bottled syrups. But Gina would doubtless have lots to say on this.
Adam, I’ll have to think about this. Not quite sure what to say. But thanks for raising the issue.
Adam, I think you’re right in your off-list comment to me. I’ve been trying to think where in the world you would get ice in New Spain. The mountains around Mexico City fairly regularly get a bit of snow but I doubt if it’s enough to preserve. The mountains above us in Guanajuato which go up to 10,000 feet get a sprinkling about every five years or so. It melts the next day though. So not an option.