History of sherbet

Sherbet is a sweet drink made with fruit juices, ground nuts or spices. In the late 1200s, the traveler Marco Polo returned to Venice frorn his sojourn in China. He published a recipe for sherbet.

The Turks learned how to make sherbet from the Arabs, who in turn had learned from the Chinese.

At Ottoman feasts sherbet were served between courses to refresh the appetite.

In the sixteenth century sherbet, entered Venetian cuisine, which had been taught how to make them by Turks, and spread from there to the rest of Italy and then on into France and other parts of Europe.

Sir Thomas Herbert (1606-1682), English traveler and historian said, ‘it is a drink that quenches thirst and tastes deliciously. The composition is cool water, into which they infuse syrup of Lemons and rose-water’. 

Fruit and almonds sherbets made their way to Sweden in the early eighteenth century, when King Charles XII of Sweden returned home with his retinue and his Turkish creditors after five years of asylum in Turkey between 1709 and 1914.

The ancient Arabic equivalent of the English verb ‘slurp’ was ‘shariba’, equivalent because both words probably developed as imitations of the lip-smacking sounds made by some one eagerly drinking or lapping up delicious refreshment.

In Italian and French they have sorbette and sorbet which probably came direct from the Levantine or Turkish form ‘shurbat or ‘shorbet’.

This Arabic verb led to the noun form ‘sharbah’, meaning drink, which Turkish borrowed as ‘sherbet’, it was this Turkish form of the word that English borrowed at the beginning of the 17th century.

This sweet sherbet was originally used to make a fizzy drink, from the 1850s.
History of sherbet