The one thing I miss in a modern dentist’s office is the old-fashion spit basin—the one where the water constantly ran around in a circle, washing down the porcelain base, until it vanished into a black hole in the center. I intently stared at the basin for the most of each visit.

I’m not sure if I visited a dentist, and his spit basin, for the first time until my permanent teeth came in. I would have been six or seven, and the year would have been around 1955. Our family dentist always seemed especially mean to me. When my brother visited him, he always came home with a certificate for a free ice cream cone from the Blue Ribbon Ice Cream Shop down the street from the dentist’s office. I came home with a sore mouth and a sour disposition.

My mother had her teeth drilled without anesthesia, and my father was filling free. Neither of them could appreciate the experience I went through. In those days, the transporting parent wasn’t allowed in the treatment room. Once I was escorted from the waiting room to the dentist’s hard, straight-back chair, I was on my own. When the dentist later went to report the near-terminal condition of my teeth, I was told to stay in the chair so he could lie about how uncooperative I was and spin yarns about my attempts to sabotage the visit. By the time I was returned to my mother, I had been tried, judged, and sentenced. My tears failed to aid in my appeal.

The initial visits hadn’t been overly bad, even though I didn’t get an ice cream certificate. But by the time I was in the seventh grade, the dentist was well into the process of covering the grinding surfaces of my molars with mercury-laden amalgam. He would inject my tender gums with a solution he called novocaine. Who knows what it really was? It didn’t seem to work, but that fact and my tears didn’t stop him from drilling. I struggled so much that he would eventually give up and then go complain to my mother. She, of course, sided with the dentist and yelled at me all the way home.

By the time I entered high-school and we had moved two towns to the south, my father insisted that a different dentist be found for me. A recent graduate of the University of Southern California School of Dentistry filled the bill and remained my dentist until he retired about forty years later. He would deaden the area of the injection site with a topical anesthetic before plunging in the needle. He would then go out and have a cigarette so the anesthetic would have time to take effect. If the area was still sensitive, the process would be repeated. If the anesthetic wore off too quickly, further injections followed. He quickly replaced all those broken, and in some cases incomplete, fillings with new ones, or in a couple of cases, with gold crowns. He also had a separate hygienist to clean my teeth, something the old dentist struggled with himself. (The new dentist didn’t give certificates to an ice cream shop as a reward.)

When we did go to cash in one of my brother’s free ice cream certificates, I’m not sure what I got. I was more partial to soft-serve ice cream in those days, hopefully dipped in chocolate, but Blue Ribbon only carried real ice cream.  My father was partial to chocolate milkshakes made with chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup, but I also remember him at times ordering rocky road ice cream. These were the days before Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins introduced “31-flavors” to our area, and I assume the selection at Blue Ribbon was not too extensive.

My mother always ordered orange sherbet. I’m not sure if there were any other sherbet flavors offered. In those days, I didn’t now what sherbet was. I really didn’t know what real ice cream was either. All I knew was that I liked soft-serve ice cream and didn’t like sherbet. Even today, after looking through various reference books and the Internet, I’m not sure what sherbet is. Some sources describe it as a sorbet mixed with beaten egg white. Some describe it as a sorbet mixed with beaten cream. Some describe it as just another name for sorbet.

I have vague memories of a particular white-linen restaurant in San Francisco serving orange sherbet as a palette cleanser in the 1950s. It was so long ago that it may have only existed in my imagination. Nonetheless, I decided to investigate sherbet as a potential addition to my meager intermèdes collection.

There was no way that I would include orange sherbet in my search, but other fruits were within bounds. I settled on the botanical, but not legal, tomato as my fruit. In 2001, I published my take on a recipe for sorbet aux tomates rouges that I had found in the book La Magie de la Tomate by Christian Etienne. In the headnote I wrote, “This sorbet may be more appropriate as an intermezzo between courses than for dessert.” (I foretold the future even way back then!)

I decided to develop an egg white-based sherbet because it sounded more interesting and would also produce an end product suitable for my lactose-intolerant friends.

I use a powerful commercial blender with a high tip speed so straining the tomato mixture is unnecessary. If you are less fortunate and only have a standard blender, you’ll need to sieve the mixture through a finer strainer to remove any pieces of skin or seeds that remain.

The quantities listed below will produce about 400 ml (1 pt) of finished sherbet. I’ve found that the sherbet lasts well in my freezer (if no one sneaks in for late-night snacks).