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Clam Punch
Pour 1 ounce of clam bouillon into a cup, fill with boiling water, season with salt, pepper and celery salt; add 1 dram sherry wine from a squirt bottle, and top with a teaspoonful of whipped cream.
A hot savory fountain drink from the era when the soda counter sold beef tea and clam broth alongside phosphates. It assembles in a minute; the only real difficulty is that the clam product on the shelf today is not the one the recipe assumes.
- Clam bouillon, then and nowFountain clam bouillon appears to have been a concentrated clam extract, so 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) diluted to a cupful gave a drink with real body. Bottled clam juice today is already dilute; use 3 to 4 ounces of it and top up with only 2 or 3 ounces of boiling water, or the result tastes of hot salted water.
- A dramA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, roughly 3/4 teaspoon. That is a flavoring, not a fortification, and the recipe adds it after the boiling water rather than before.
- The squirt bottleFountains kept wine and flavorings in small squirt bottles for dispensing small quantities. Any small measure does the same job; the instruction is about portion control, not technique.
- Season lightlyClam juice is already salty. Taste before adding salt at all; the celery salt is doing most of the seasoning work and pepper should be a couple of grinds.
- The whipped cream is unsweetenedThe recipe gives no sugar, and none is wanted in a savory cup. Whip it soft, to barely holding a shape, so it slumps into the surface rather than sitting on it as a cap.
- Serve the cup hotA cup of liquid this thin loses heat fast and goes flat-tasting. Rinse the cup with boiling water first, and hand it over immediately.
- YieldOne cup. Scale by the cup rather than making a batch, since the cream must go on at the last second.
Clam broth was a fixture of American fountains and lunch counters from the 1890s through the 1920s, sold as much for health as for pleasure: it was recommended for invalids and as a warming winter alternative to iced sodas. Concentrated clam bouillon and clam extract were commercial products of the same trade that gave us bottled beef tea, and drugstores stocked them beside the syrups. The teaspoon of whipped cream and the dram of sherry mark the drink as a fountain confection rather than a soup, a savory built to the same pattern as the sundaes and phosphates on either side of it; the sherry is often said to date the recipe, on the assumption that American fountains gave up the wine squirt bottles once Prohibition arrived in 1920, though how quickly and completely they did so is uncertain.