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Seaside Shake
Put into a glass three tablespoonfuls of clam juice and four tablespoonfuls of milk or cream. Fill up the glass with soda water. Stir well and season with salt and a little white pepper.
A savory soda-fountain drink from the section meant for the sick-room, closer to a cold consommé than to anything sweet. It comes together in under a minute, and the only real skill is keeping it from separating.
- The hinge: pour the soda last and slowlyClam juice is salty and slightly acidic, and a hard blast of carbonated water into cold milk will make it look curdled almost at once. Combine the clam juice and milk first, then tilt the glass and add the soda water down the side.
- Clam juice todayThe original assumed the liquor drained from freshly opened clams or a strained clam broth. Bottled clam juice from the supermarket is cooked and shelf-stable and works directly; if you shuck your own, simmer the liquor briefly and strain it rather than using it raw, since raw clam liquor carries the same Vibrio risk as raw shellfish.
- QuantitiesThree tablespoons is a scant 1/4 cup of clam juice, four tablespoons is exactly 1/4 cup of milk, about 3 1/2 ounces of liquid in all. The recipe does not say how big the glass is; in a standard 8-ounce glass that would leave roughly 4 1/2 ounces of soda water.
- Milk or cream'Cream' at the time covered a wide range of fat levels, and a thinner cream is the likelier reading here, so half-and-half is a reasonable modern stand-in. Whole milk gives a thinner, more broth-like drink and is less likely to look broken.
- Soda waterPlain seltzer or club soda. Avoid tonic, which is sweetened and quinine-bitter, and avoid mineral waters with a strong sulfur or salt character, since the clam juice supplies plenty of salt already.
- Salt with a light handBottled clam juice is already heavily salted. Taste before adding any salt at all; the white pepper is the part that actually earns its place.
- TemperatureEverything should be refrigerator-cold, including the glass. Warm clam juice tastes markedly fishier, and the carbonation dissipates fast in a room-temperature drink.
- YieldOne glass, roughly 8 ounces. Drink it immediately; it goes flat and separates within a few minutes.
This belongs to a distinct American genre: the savory invalid drink, dispensed from the same soda fountain that sold phosphates and ice cream sodas. Clam juice and clam broth were considered mildly restorative and easy on a weak stomach through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and clam bouillon was a standard fountain item alongside beef tea. The salt-and-white-pepper finish is the tell that this was meant to substitute for a savory restorative rather than a sweet treat, and it is tempting, though only speculation, to see it pointing forward to the clam-and-tomato drinks that came later in the century.