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Tomato Bouillon
One ounce American Tomato Bouillon in a cup, fill with hot water, season with celery salt and serve.
A one-line fountain formula that assumes a jar of commercial concentrate under the counter. The whole thing hinges on what you put in the cup.
- What the "Bouillon" was"American Tomato Bouillon" appears to be a proprietary tomato concentrate of the sort supply houses sold to soda fountains; the recipe assumes the reader has a container of it to hand. Nothing on a modern shelf is a direct match; the nearest equivalents are tomato paste thinned with a strong vegetable or beef stock, or a tomato bouillon cube.
- One ounceMost likely a fluid ounce, two tablespoons, though the recipe does not say whether it means volume or weight. If you are working from paste, start with about a tablespoon per cup and adjust — paste is denser and less salty than a concentrate of this kind.
- Fill with hot waterFountain hot water taps ran near boiling, which was enough to dissolve the extract with a quick stir. If you substitute tomato paste it will not disperse in a cup of hot water on its own; slacken it with a spoonful of liquid first, or you get a lump at the bottom and pink water above.
- Celery saltNot optional garnish — it is the only seasoning in the drink and the reason it reads as savoury rather than as warm tomato juice. A pinch on top.
- Yield and serviceOne cup, perhaps 6 to 8 oz. Served hot, as a drink rather than a soup.
- Salt levelConcentrates of this era were built to be salty enough to taste through a full cup of water. If you use a commercial cube or canned broth, taste before adding celery salt or the result will be undrinkable.
Soda fountains had an obvious problem: the trade that carried them through July collapsed in January. The answer, generally traced to the last decades of the nineteenth century, was the hot department — beef tea, malted milk, clam bouillon, hot chocolate and tomato bouillon, all dispensed from the same counter with the same speed as a phosphate. Tomato bouillon sat at the savoury end of that list and was pitched as something between a soup and a tonic, a drink one might plausibly order alone at a drugstore counter. The recipe's brevity is the point: the flavour appears to have been a prepared one, and the druggist's skill lay in the cup, the temperature and the shake of celery salt. That reliance on branded concentrates is also why so many fountain formulas of the period are now unreproducible as written — the ingredient was a product, not a food.