Home › At the Fountain › Hot Clam Soda
Hot Clam Soda
One teaspoonful of American Clam Bouillon and a little cream; fill cup with hot water; stir with a spoon, and add salt and pepper.
A fountain drink rather than a soup: a hot savory cup built to order in the same mug that would hold beef tea or hot chocolate. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the strength of the clam base.
- What "American Clam Bouillon" wasA bottled clam extract sold as a concentrate, spooned out and let down with hot water at the counter. Nothing sold today matches it exactly; the closest modern stand-in is bottled clam juice used undiluted, or clam broth reduced hard until a teaspoonful carries real flavor.
- If you use clam juice insteadBottled clam juice is already close to drinking strength, so it will not behave like a concentrate. Build the cup as roughly three parts hot clam juice to one part hot water rather than a teaspoon to a full cup.
- Cup sizeA fountain bouillon cup ran about 6 to 8 ounces. That is the intended yield: one serving.
- "A little cream"A tablespoon or so of cream, no more. It is there to round the salt and give the cup body, not to make a chowder; too much and the clam flavor flattens.
- Salt with careClam extract and bottled clam juice are both heavily salted. Taste before adding anything, and expect to need only pepper.
- Heat, not boilingVery hot water is enough here; boiling cream into a salty clam broth can curdle it.
- ServingServe immediately in a warmed cup; oyster crackers or a salted wafer on the saucer suit it.
Soda fountains did not close for winter, and by the 1890s and 1900s the better ones kept a hot-water tap and a short list of savory cups to sell when nobody wanted ice cream: beef tea, hot malted milk, celery or tomato bouillon, and clam. Bottled clam bouillon and clam extract were marketed as much for the sickroom as for pleasure, in the same commercial breath as beef extracts that promised strength in a cup. That double life explains the drink's place in a soda book at all: the fountain in this period sat somewhere between the drugstore and the lunch counter, and a teaspoon of clam concentrate topped with hot water was sold as both a restorative and a snack. The recipe's brevity is the point.