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Clam Juice and Ginger
Mix well two tablespoonfuls each of ginger syrup, cream, and clam juice. Add hot water and season with celery salt and salt.
A hot savory drink from the soda-fountain era, closer to a thin broth than anything sweet despite the ginger syrup. It comes together in a minute, but the proportions and the temperature of the cream both matter.
- How much hot waterThe original leaves it open. About six ounces gives a drinkable cup; less than four and the clam juice dominates completely.
- Ginger syrupFountain ginger syrup was a heavy sugar syrup steeped with ginger, not the pale ginger ale syrup sold now. Simmer equal parts sugar and water with a few tablespoons of sliced fresh ginger for ten minutes and strain, or use a bottled ginger simple syrup.
- Clam juiceBottled clam juice, pasteurized and sold beside the canned fish, is what to use. Bottled juice is generally salted, so taste before adding any salt at all.
- Keep the cream from breakingMix the cream with the syrup and clam juice cold and thoroughly, then add water that is hot but not boiling, pouring slowly while stirring. Boiling water poured onto salted, faintly acidic dairy can curdle it.
- Cream, then and nowCream of this period was unstandardised, and what a recipe called simply "cream" was often thinner than modern heavy cream. Half-and-half is the safer match; heavy cream makes the cup greasy at this ratio.
- SeasoningCelery salt supplies both the salt and the vegetal note. Add it a pinch at a time and skip the additional plain salt unless the drink tastes flat.
- YieldOne serving, a generous cupful. It does not hold or reheat, so make it to order.
Savory hot drinks belong to a period when the soda fountain doubled as a dispensary and the sickroom tray was a serious branch of cookery. Clam broth and clam bouillon appeared on fountain menus in the first decades of the twentieth century, poured hot in winter alongside beef tea and malted milk, and marketed as nourishment for people who could not manage solid food. Convalescents were commonly fed thin, warm, salted liquids, on the general belief that broth carried strength in a form the stomach need not work for. The addition of cream and ginger syrup to shellfish liquor looks odd now, but it follows the logic of the counter it came from, where every drink was built from the syrups and dairy already at hand.