The Sherbert Fountain was uniquely messy among sweets and required undivided attention and quite some skill to be able to consume flawlessly. One slip and you ran the real risk of looking like you had been practicing your lines with ‘Mork and Mindy’ era Robin Williams. A little internet research reveals that sherbert means different things to different nationalities. 
We British correctly understand that it’s the brain numbingly sweet fizzy powder that you might find inside a sherbert lemon - the sweet that Dumbledore insists on handing out to his magical pupils. However, Americans think of sherbert as being a some form of frozen desert, weird eh? The word comes from the Arabic sharab, a sweetened fruit drink which was introduced by the Moors when they conquered Spain. Around the end of the 19th century - a group of rogue English and German chemists discovered that a mixture of bicarbonate of soda, tartaric acid and a couple of shovelfuls of sugar produced a sweet mixture which fizzed when it came into contact with water - or indeed saliva. Some of the sharpest chemistry minds in Europe were stunned when a group of maverik scientists demonstrated how if you tipped a whole handfull of the new powder into their mouths at once, you could do an excellent impression of a rabid dog - shortly before their teeth immediately rotted away before the assembled dignataries. They were laughed out of their profession by their peers who accused them of bring their calling into disrepute with their pointless invention. The disgruntled boffins vowed to turn their skills to evil and invented both mustard gas, and chemistry homework.
