Consider sherbet

The nomenclature of food is arcane and elusive, muddled in history, religion, class and geography, morphed and moulded by a shapeshifting language. English is the slipperiest of tongues, devouring words that come its way and digesting them in a crowded, polyglot gut. Why does a piece of cooked cow magic itself into beef at the table, or a joint of pig become pork? Because cow and pig are Old English words, grunted over the clod and tilth by benighted Anglo-Saxons. When the Normans sallied over in 1066 their fancy, froggy words for meat (boeuf and porc) were co-opted by – and imposed on to – aspirant locals.

Sherbet means different things to different people. Most Brits recognise it as a sweet powder that fizzes when you add water to it – and, by extension, a colloquialism for lager. Ask an American, though, and they'll tell you it's a frozen dessert, distinct from ice cream and sorbet. Until very recently, US "sherbet" may or may not have included milk: Californian regulations stated that dairy was banned from anything labelled as sherbet, but in New York State all sherbet had to include something lactic. Federal laws now decree that American "sherbet" must contain at least 2% milk solids.

The history of sherbet helps explain this discrepancy. The word stems ultimately from the classical Arabic sharab, a sweetened fruit drink. The Moors introduced word and drink to Europe around 1,000 years ago, and it became our word syrup and the French sirop. Later, though, sharab came to mean a specifically boozy drink (as it still does in Punjabi), and thus a different Arabic word was needed for a nonalcoholic drink. Sharbat, which might sound familiar to you, took this place.

Sharbat the drink has barely changed for 500 years. It's essentially fruit or vegetable juice sweetened with honey or sugar. Such drinks are usually iced, but old Persian kings drank theirs cooled by snow. It was this sherbet, along with the silken girls and the palaces, that the Magus ruefully remembered in TS Eliot's matchless dramatic monologue.

Sharbat became sorbet in French, and in the 1800s, sorbet evolved into the frozen, eatable dish we know today. Since the Victorian era, then, the English have had two words, sherbet and sorbet, to describe two different things: a sweet drink and a frozen dessert. The Americans, however, used sherbet and sorbet as synonyms for the water ice. Thus, sherbet remained a drink in British English while sorbet referred to the ice, and American English lost any sense that sherbet was a drink.

To sherbet powder, then. Around the end of the 19th century, English and German chemists discovered almost simultaneously that a mixture of bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid and a great deal of sugar (to mask the unpleasant taste of the other two) fizzed appealingly when added to water. They called this "sherbet" in the hope it might piggyback on the exotic eastern otherness of the predecessor.

Cheap, industrial and distinctive, sherbet powder became a staple of 20th-century sweets, and today it sparkles in the memory of millions of British adults. Not in those of Americans, though, which is why Mike Myers and Christian Slater could do a brief routine on it in the first Austin Powers film. Flying saucers, Dib Dabs and sherbet lemons were among the greatest sweets of old. Sherbet bombs – the generic name for flying saucers – are still around, but most kiddie sweets seem more colourful and complicated than they used to be, which is doubtless appreciated by children.

My own sweet-eating heyday was the early 90s, and I remember well the gorgeous clammy frustration of sherbet fountains. The licorice straw would invariably collapse on itself, the powder stick at the bottom, the sweet disintegrate into a soggy, sibilating mousse. Last year, the fountain's parent company, Tangerine, announced its plans to manufacture the product in "hygienic" plastic. The resulting outcry was as predictable as it was justified. The chairman of the company, spooked and paranoid at the prospect of being sued, whimpered at the time, "I know it sounds a bit anaemic to say that we changed the packaging for hygiene reasons but it did need to be done." It did not. No one had dropped dead from eating a sherbet fountain, and the memory of food can affect taste just as much as ingredients.

In Scotland, especially around Glasgow, sherbet reached an apex of lurid joy with Creamola Foam, a glistening powder smelling of bleach and fillings which made a limply fizzy, hyperactively sweet drink. I realise now I must have owned one of the last Creamola tins in Scotland, because the stuff was discontinued in 1998 and I was certainly given one that year. To the joy of many, a Dumbarton sweet company began producing "Kramola Fizz" a few months ago, and I bought some of this rather pricey product to taste. The most extraordinary thing about it is the way it changes colour: the powder is the palest baby-bottom pink, but when you pour over the water it all goes a deep, renal, camel's piss ochre. Back in January, the Scottish Parliament tabled a motion hailing the return of this sugary dust and wishing "the new producer, Alan McCandlish of Cardross, every success with the expected relaunch". Who said devolution trivialises government?

Sherbet is a complicated beast, liquid and solid and something in between. It shows that the words for food are as transient as the foods themselves, and that the meaning and value of a dish are flimsy, fleeting constructs. Sherbet's only certainty is sweetness. This being an internationally minded site, with lots of you coming from around the world, do share below your own sherbet memories, be they fizzing or frozen.