The natural sweet beverage of India was sugarcane juice, which was often flavoured with ginger. (Express Archive) T ake a kancha aam (green mango), roast it over a flame until the skin blisters. Then remove the skin, extract the pulp, and puree it with a little ginger, salt, and sugar. Add this to a pan with water and boil until it reaches a thick, juice-like texture. Then cool it, bottle it, pour this concentrate into a glass, top with cold water, and thank the gods for what we in Bengal call aam porar shorbot . The hot Indian summer is upon us, and the one panacea for it is a tall, cold glass of sherbet . And in India, depending on which region you’re in, you can choose from mango to sugarcane to bel (wood apple). Now, to be clear, sharbat is not interchangeable with juice – sharbat always has some added flavouring, whether it is ginger, rock salt, sugar, or all of these. It is amped up juice. But was sherbet part and parcel of India?…