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Bouillon, Soup
The contents of a can of American Bouillon will make 6 cups of delicious soup. Place 1¾ ounces of condensed soup in a fine china cup, and fill with very hot water. Fill the cup with hot water, to warm it before using. Keep the condensed soup in a small, covered, silver-plated tureen and use a silver-plated ladle.
This is a fountain service note rather than a cooking recipe: the work is in the dilution and the presentation. A few of its numbers and vessels need translating.
- The "134 ounces" is a misprintAlmost certainly 1¾ ounces of condensed bouillon, which divides sensibly into a can yielding six cups. Treat it as roughly 3½ tablespoons of concentrate per cup of water and adjust to taste.
- What "American Bouillon" wasWhat "American Bouillon" was — Evidently a canned condensed bouillon, presumably beef, of the kind commercial soup makers supplied; the recipe itself says nothing about the trade it was sold into. Modern bouillon cubes and jarred pastes are far more concentrated; about one teaspoon of paste to a cup of water is the usual starting point.
- Very hot, not boilingVery hot, not boiling — Water at a hard boil poured into thin china risks cracking the cup and scalds the drinker. Water just off the boil is a reasonable reading of "very hot," though the original gives no temperature.
- Warming the cup is the pointWarming the cup is the point — The instruction to fill and empty the cup first is not fussiness: a cold china cup pulls heat out of a small serving of broth quickly. The apparent repetition of the step in the text may simply be a printing duplication.
- SaltSalt — Commercial concentrates then and now are heavily salted. Taste before adding anything.
- The silver-plated tureenThe silver-plated tureen — A covered holloware pot kept the concentrate at the counter, visible and dignified, and plating would have kept salty broth off bare base metal. A small stainless or enamelled pot with a lid serves the same purpose.
- YieldYield — One can, six cups, as the recipe states; it gives no size for the cup.
Soda fountains were seasonal businesses, and hot bouillon was one of the answers to winter. Alongside clam broth, hot chocolate, malted milk and beef tea, a cup of bouillon let a druggist's counter keep its trade through the months when nobody wanted an ice-cream soda, and it carried the additional respectability of being regarded as restorative — beef tea and bouillon were standard invalid fare in nineteenth-century household medicine before they became a counter drink. The insistence here on fine china, a silver-plated tureen and a plated ladle is telling: the preparation amounts to little more than opening a can and adding hot water, and what is being staged is service and setting as much as broth. Commercially canned condensed soups and beef extracts had made that possible.