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Chicken and Clam Bouillon
Mix one quart chicken stock with one quart of clam water, heat to boiling point, season with salt, pepper and cayenne. Serve in cups with whipped cream.
A two-ingredient consommé that depends entirely on the quality of the two liquids. The only real decision is salt, and it has to be made after the clam water is in the pot.
- Clam waterThis most likely means the liquor released by steaming clams open and strained, rather than bottled clam juice thinned with water. Let it settle and pour it off the sand, or strain through a coffee filter; grit in a clear broth is unforgivable.
- Salt last, if at allClam liquor is already saline, sometimes aggressively so, and modern bottled clam juice is saltier still. Combine the two quarts, bring to a boil, taste, and only then consider salt. The cayenne matters more here than the salt does.
- Chicken stockA recipe of this date would have meant homemade stock. If you use commercial broth, buy the unsalted kind, or the finished bouillon will be inedible against the clam liquor.
- Heat to boiling point, then stopA boil is enough to marry the two and drive off any raw shellfish smell. Held at a rolling boil the clam liquor turns flat and slightly metallic, and any albumen left in it will cloud the cup.
- ClarityBouillon served in cups is judged by eye. If either liquid is cloudy, clarify with a beaten egg white and shell before combining, then strain through a cloth; do not stir once the raft sets.
- The whipped creamUnsweetened, whipped only to soft peaks, a spoonful floated on each cup at the moment of serving. It is a garnish, not a thickener, and it slackens quickly on hot liquid, which is why the cups go straight to the table.
- Cups, not bowlsA bouillon cup holds about six ounces. Two quarts fills roughly ten cups as a first course, or eight generously.
Clear bouillons served in handled cups were a fixture of American entertaining around 1900, offered as the opening course at dinner or handed round at receptions, where a cup could be drunk standing up. Combining chicken stock with clam liquor may well have been a matter of economy as much as refinement: the liquor left from steaming clams was too good to pour away, and blended with fowl stock it stretched into something that read as a consommé without the labor of a proper one. The float of whipped cream is characteristic of the period's taste for a pale, rich finish on clear soups, and the cayenne is the standing Victorian answer to shellfish, though the reasoning behind it is a matter of inference rather than record.