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Bouillon and Celery
Dissolve one bouillon cube in hot water. Stir well, add cream, and season with salt and celery salt. Serve with saltines.
The original gives no quantities at all, which is typical of invalid cookery — the nurse was expected to judge by the cup. Here is what the proportions should be.
- Working proportionsOne cube to 1 cup (8 oz) of hot water, with 1 to 2 tablespoons of cream stirred in at the end. More cream than that and it stops being bouillon and starts being a thin cream soup.
- Salt last, or not at allModern bouillon cubes carry roughly 800-1,000 mg of sodium each. Taste before adding any salt; the celery salt alone will usually be enough. A quarter teaspoon of celery salt per cup is a reasonable starting point.
- Do not boil after the cream goes inSalt and prolonged heat can make cream separate. Dissolve the cube in water just off the boil, then stir the cream in and serve. If the cream is fridge-cold, warm it slightly first.
- Which cream"cream" in this period covered a wide range of richness; modern light cream (around 18-20% fat) is a reasonable choice, and half-and-half is thinner still. Heavy cream makes the drink greasy; whole milk works but thins the body noticeably.
- Bouillon cubes then and nowCubes of this period were built on dried meat extract with salt and other flavourings. Many of today's cubes lean heavily on salt, fat and yeast extract, sometimes with little or no meat. A teaspoon of a decent beef or chicken base paste gives a closer result than a supermarket cube.
- ServingOne cup, served hot in a handled cup or bouillon bowl rather than a soup plate, so an invalid can drink it. Saltines are the intended accompaniment and are worth keeping — the dry cracker is part of the point.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of non-alcoholic drink books that appeared around the arrival of national Prohibition, when publishers scrambled to fill the gap left on the sideboard. Its drinks for the sickroom sit in a much older tradition, though: beef tea, broths and meat extracts were the backbone of nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, believed to carry nourishment in a form a weak stomach could accept. The bouillon cube was the industrial shortcut to that tradition — commercial meat extracts and compressed cubes had become widely available in Europe and America in the decades before the First World War, and by 1919 a cube in the pantry was ordinary enough that a recipe needed to say nothing more about it. The cream and celery salt are the cook's small gesture toward palatability, since plain broth was notoriously monotonous for anyone kept on it for days.