I got this idea in my head watching The Bishop's Wife (1947), the story of an angel played by Cary Grant who's trying to save a self-imporant young bishop from losing sight of what's important. In the movie, there's rag-tag children's choir at the little inner-city parish of St. Timothy's (the bishop's former post); given that sherbet punch is thoroughly postwar, I thought the kids in the choir would appreciate this one, and so might the kids in your world! I also made it balanced to please those adults who aren't partaking.

Mary’s cousin Colin believes he will always be ill, but Mary and Dickon bring him and his household back to life! Though this drink is non-alcoholic, I took inspiration from the John & Tom Collins, a family of drinks that sometimes called for genever as a base. Sort of a very complex strawberry-rhubarb lemonade, a nod to lemonades as one of the most important teetotal categories in drinks history.

Shrubs were a popular method of preserving fruit in New England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though almost all apple cider in those days was fermented, I saw an opportunity here to build a non-alcoholic drink reflecting this month’s historical milieu with sweet, non-alcoholic cider, cranberry shrub, and our ginger-molasses syrup, with lemon juice to bolster the acid and salt and cayenne to liven things up.