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Chicken Broth and Bouillon
One ounce American Concentrated Chicken Bouillon. Hot water to fill mug. Season with salt and pepper, or celery salt. This is a real chicken bouillon of most delicious flavor, and universally successful at the hot soda counter. May be improved by stirring into the drink a spoonful of whipped cream.
A fountain drink rather than a cooked dish: the whole job is dilution and seasoning, so the concentrate you choose decides the result.
- What the ounce means"One ounce" is probably a fluid ounce dipped from a fountain container of liquid or paste extract rather than a weighed ounce of powder, though the recipe does not say which. Modern bouillon pastes and concentrates are generally more reduced than old fountain extracts, so start with 1 to 2 teaspoons per cup and build up rather than measuring out a full fluid ounce.
- Mug sizeA hot-soda counter mug was generally small, on the order of 6 to 8 fluid ounces rather than the size of a modern diner mug. Scale the concentrate to the mug you actually use.
- American Concentrated Chicken BouillonEvidently a branded fountain supply of the sort a counter bought in ready-made concentrate form; the recipe gives no detail of its packaging. Any chicken base, paste concentrate, or strong reduced homemade stock stands in; a cube dissolves but tastes thinner and saltier.
- Salt lastCommercial bases are already heavily salted. Taste before adding anything, and reach for the celery salt or white pepper before the salt shaker.
- Water temperatureFountain hot water was drawn very hot, which is what you want to dissolve a paste cleanly. Whisk or stir hard for a few seconds; undissolved base settles into a salty slick at the bottom of the mug.
- The whipped creamAdd it unsweetened and only at the moment of serving, stirred into the drink as the recipe says. Fountain whipped cream was often sweetened for sundaes, and sweetened cream will make this drink taste wrong.
- YieldOne mug, one drink. The formula is per-serving by design, which is how fountain work was written.
Soda fountains did steady business in cold weather by selling hot drinks, and bouillon sat on the winter menu beside hot chocolate, malted milk, and hot lemonade. Beef tea and meat extracts had a long nineteenth-century reputation as invalid food and restorative, which is why a drugstore counter, part shop and part dispensary, could sell a cup of broth without anyone thinking it odd; chicken bouillon was the milder, more genteel version of the same idea. Concentrated extracts sold in jars made it possible for a dispenser with no kitchen and no stockpot to serve a savory drink to order in seconds, which is the whole logic of a fountain formula book like this one: everything is per-mug, and the manufacturer has done the cooking.