Let's Bring Back Rainbow Sherbet Punch

Sometimes you need a break from the craziness of this modern age, which is why we're celebrating nostalgic foods this week at BonAppetit.com.

When I was a kid in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, my grandma prepared for every single party the same way. As the scalloped potatoes roasted in the oven and the shrimp mousse jelled in the refrigerator, she would empty out an entire brick of rainbow sherbet, scoop by scoop, into a gigantic glass punch bowl, and pour over it a two-liter bottle of dollar store–brand ginger ale. As the ginger ale showered over the rounded scoops, the sherbet expanded into an otherworldly pastel fizz, and the ginger ale, which had been sitting in the pantry at room temperature, became icy cold and milky. She’d set a matching glass ladle and some punch cups next to the bowl, and this elegant kaleidoscope of crystal and foam would become the coffee table centerpiece and official kid drink of the night.

The punch is sort of a distant cousin of the root beer float—or maybe a distant aunt who never leaves the house without a thick layer of pink lipstick and pristinely feathered hair. But unlike the root beer float, which came out of the soda fountains of the 1890s, rainbow sherbet punch’s history is somewhat mysterious.

Rainbow sherbet itself was invented in the 1950s, in Pennsylvania, when an employee at Sealtest Dairies invented a nozzle that would fill a carton with three different flavors of sherbet simultaneously. The sherbet I remember most vividly from childhood involved a melange of artificial orange, lime, and raspberry flavors, but the “rainbow” is pretty much open for interpretation. Baskin-Robbins still sells a version flavored with orange, raspberry, and pineapple. The origins of using the fruity tricolor stuff in punch are harder to trace. A search for “sherbet punch” on Cooks.com yields 1,160 results—each one a slight variation on the recipe that I remember, sometimes involving bobbing pieces of fruit, 7-Up, or lemonade. Some recipes are bolstered with a pint of vodka or a bottle of champagne swapped in for the ginger ale.

When I asked my mom recently where the concept came from, she couldn’t remember definitively but said, “It was just the kind of recipe you used to see in church cookbooks all the time.” It occurred to me that Pinterest might be the closest thing we have these days to a church cookbook. In addition to being the information age’s own giant scrapbook, dream board, and shopping list, Pinterest is also one of the most reliable ways for enterprising, like-minded matriarchs to exchange clever luncheon recipes. Sure enough, when I typed “sherbet punch” into the search bar, an entire thriving subculture appeared, under aliases like “Pond Punch” (the color of pond scum and adorned with floating rubber ducks), “Mr. Frog Floats” (divvied in individual servings that look like disintegrating frogs, see above), and “Baby Shower Punch (for a boy)” (in which blue Hawaiian Punch gives the entire bowl a cartoon-bathtub feel, see below). Paula Deen even has her own DayGlo green rendition.

Despite the drink’s proliferation on the Internet, I haven’t encountered sherbet punch face-to-face in a good 20 years. Where did I go wrong? When did I decide to trade in its pearly neon hues for the sallow neutrals of Haagen-Dazs and Halo Top? When did I gamble away its plastic citrus tang for five-ingredient approximations of “coffee” and “Tahitian vanilla”?

And yet here I am, an adult with a punch bowl and an Instagram account. Why not pick up a $3 carton of rainbow sherbet and greet friends with a fruity, nostalgic, frothy sherbet-Champagne punch when they arrive at a party of mine? Why drink in monochrome when you can drink in technicolor?