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Chicken Soup
The contents of a can of American Chicken Soup 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 chicken soup should be removed from the can at once after opening, and kept in a tureen or glass bottle.
This is a soda-fountain service note rather than a cooking recipe: it tells the dispenser how to portion canned condensed soup into a cup and top it with hot water. The arithmetic works, but the holding instructions do not meet any current standard for a ready-to-eat meat product.
- The quantity is a typo"134 ounces" is an optical-character error for 1¾ ounces. A standard can of condensed soup of the period ran about 10½ ounces, which divided into six cups gives roughly 1¾ ounces of concentrate per serving — consistent with the stated yield.
- Why the holding instruction failsOpened condensed chicken soup is a low-acid, meat-containing food. The text directs that it be decanted into a tureen or bottle and drawn from through the day, with no mention of ice, refrigeration or reheating. Held at room temperature it sits squarely in the range where Clostridium perfringens, Bacillus cereus and Staphylococcus aureus multiply, and the staphylococcal toxin is not destroyed by later heating.
- Hot water is not cookingDiluting cold concentrate with kettle water in a china cup produces a drink well below any pasteurising temperature, and the cup itself pulls heat out fast. Nothing in this method brings the soup to a temperature that would correct contamination picked up during holding.
- What to do insteadFollow the current directions on the can, which specify heating and immediate service, and refrigerate any unused concentrate in a covered container. Use a modern soup recipe or manufacturer's instructions rather than this one.
Soda fountains were seasonal businesses, and the winter problem was real: the same marble counter that sold phosphates in July stood idle in January. The answer, from roughly the 1890s onward, was hot service — beef bouillon, clam broth, malted milk and chicken soup drawn in a cup rather than a bowl, so it read as a beverage and could be sold across the same counter without a kitchen behind it. Commercially canned condensed soup, introduced in the United States in the late 1890s and distributed widely in the early years of the twentieth century, made this possible for a dispenser with no cooking equipment beyond a hot-water tap. The insistence on fine china, a silver-plated tureen and a warmed cup is usually read as reflecting the fountain's ambition in this period to be seen as a respectable alternative to the saloon.