Beef Fizz and Clam Sweat

move over, aperol spritzes

What’s up, children?

Actually, if you are a child you should not be reading this. Go socially distance with some friends over a heated round of Pogs.

Every week someone tags me on Facebook or on Twitter when a demonic recipe is unearthed from the hellish food crypt of the 70’s. Why won’t these stay dead?!

In this case, I’ve been getting pestered about this specific recipe:

marvin @docmarvy

From a 1975 Kitchen Companion drink guide. Cool off on a hot day with a frosty Beef Fizz. @70s_party

Beef Fizz.

If you’ve been reading my entire bloggy newsletter thing, you may remember I recreated something similar, called the Beef Tingler. It was terrible. Why was everyone in the 70’s obsessed with drinking beef?

Here’s what I picture you cackling when you see these things: “Dannis Dannis Dannis you need to make a Beef Fizz and tell us what it’s like because none of us are dumb enough to do it.”

Fine, fine. I’ll do it.

I’m like that classmate of yours who would eat anything in a grade school dare, except I’m 39 and still in kindergarten.

There’s only three ingredients in a Beef Fizz: Condensed beef soup, ginger ale, and lemon juice.

I’m sitting here, contemplating the meaning of life and the heaviness of humanity, and I cannot for the life of me understand the thought process behind someone making a fizzy beef drink.

One puzzling thing (among a million of them) about this recipe is that it requires you using concentrated, un-reconstituted beef broth.

This person thought, “Fuck you, if you’re going to drink beef, don’t water it down. Really taste that meat.”

Here, have a semi-blurry picture of me pouring ginger ale into a bowl full of brown.

Bowl Full of Brown is going to be the name of my future memoir.

Nothing like nutritious carbonated soup!

I can’t believe this is the shit I do on my day off.

I squeezed half a lemon into this concoction, stirred it gently, and poured it over a giant fancy ice cube.

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Yoshi were joined by their new friend, Cell Phone, in admiring this unusual beverage.

I took a sip and frowned.

I went through a lot of emotions. It definitely was cold and fizzy, but I didn’t taste any ginger ale. The concentrated beef juice was just too overwhelming. You could have poured in carbonated sewer water and I probably wouldn’t be able to tell. There’s a lot of salt and MSG in shitty canned beef broth, and my stomach immediately seized up from all the sodium. Then I died.

While I was in hell, I did some thinking. Why couldn’t I come up with my own concoction? Apparently in the 70’s, it was the Wild Wild West and people ran around in circles drinking cold boiled cow carcass water mixed with soft drinks. I could get away with anything, really.

I climbed back up to earth from the underworld and emerged from the ground, covered in dirt, laughing to myself. A muffled Satan boomed, “Hey, Dannis? Will you be back by supper? We’re having tuna casserole!”

“That sounds terrific!” I shouted down the hole. “Give me a few minutes! I’m giving these fools a recipe for something disgusting! I’m going to call it Clam Sweat!”

A few moments of pure silence passed. Muffled Satan spoke again, but quietly.

“You can just stay up there.”

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Cell Phone gathered around the ingredients for Clam Sweat.

This recipe would call for alcohol. You know, to make it classy and shit. All we need is clam juice, lime juice, gin, and a sports drink with an interesting name.

This is Pocari Sweat.

Pocari Sweat is a sports drink (like Gatorade), from Japan. I love the stuff; you can find it in a lot of Asian grocery stores. It’s got a light grapefruit flavor and it isn’t very sweet, with the added bonus of the best name ever. Another cool thing is that they’re going to launch it onto the moon.

I’m not kidding.

Despite how disappointing humanity has been lately, sometimes there are beacons of light shining through the darkness.

Ah, the delicious taste of clam, in juice form. They didn’t even bother calling it broth.

These clams grow on trees beneath the ocean where dolphins pick them one by one and run them through an industrial juicer.

Mr. Bee looked uncomfortable as I poured about two ounces of clam juice into a glass.

I took a swig of it. Nothing like the refreshing taste of clam water to get you through 2020.

Gin is perfect for a summer drink, isn’t it?

I squeezed some lime juice in and filled the pint glass with couple rocks. And ice. I gave the whole thing a nice vigorous stir with a chopstick, disrespecting the food utensil used by my people.

I then transferred the nectar of the gods into a rocks glass with a giant ice cube in it. Large ice cubes indicate that you have a sophisticated sense of taste.

To top it off, I added a nice generous dose of Sweat.

That piece of flotsam on top is some lime peel.

I tried to play bartender but I failed miserably, just like I do in most endeavors. I gritted my teeth and took a nice healthy sip.

This cocktail was very bad. In general, it probably would be in the bottom 1% of all cocktails. All I tasted was slightly sweet clam juice followed by the sharp unwelcoming taste of gin. It’s like the gin was trying to escape the clam juice. I stared at the floor, thinking about how I had succeeded in failing deeply.

A void appeared on the kitchen tile.

Satan, still muffled, said, “Seriously, don’t come back down here. That looked terrible.”

---

Clam Sweat. This is how innovation happens. Here’s the share button — sharing does a ton for Food is Stupid.

If you sign up for a paid subscription, you’ll get access to some subscriber-only shit. There’s a 15% discount until July 1st.

Venmo: @dickholedannis

And for the love of God, wear a goddamn mask.