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Bouillon and Curry
Dissolve one bouillon cube in hot water, and add a little curry powder and salt to season. Stir well.
A one-line invalid drink: essentially a cup of savory broth with a whisper of curry. The whole thing hinges on restraint with the curry powder and on not making the cup too salty to sip slowly.
- How much waterThe original gives none, presumably leaving it to the ratio printed on the cube tin. Modern cubes are generally formulated for 8 oz (1 cup) of water each; for a drink meant to be sipped rather than eaten as soup, 8-10 oz per cube is right. One cube yields one serving.
- Curry powder means a pinch"A little" here is about 1/8 teaspoon, no more. Curry powder sold in American groceries of this period was generally a mild, turmeric-heavy blend; a modern hot Madras blend at the same volume will overwhelm a cup of broth.
- Get rid of the gritRaw curry powder stirred into liquid stays gritty and tastes dusty. Whisk it into a spoonful of the hot bouillon to a smooth paste first, then stir that back in, and let the cup stand two or three minutes before serving so the spices bloom and any sediment settles.
- Salt is probably unnecessaryThe recipe calls for salt, but a bouillon cube today typically carries several hundred to over a thousand milligrams of sodium, which is usually plenty. Taste before adding any.
- Serving temperatureHot but drinkable, in a cup or mug rather than a bowl, since it is meant to be sipped over several minutes.
- If it is genuinely for a sick personAnyone on a sodium-restricted diet should have low-sodium broth or unsalted homemade stock instead; the cube is the whole sodium load of the drink.
- A better base if you have itA cup of well-skimmed homemade beef or chicken stock, reduced slightly, gives the same result with more body. The point of the cube was that it required no stockpot.
This comes from the tradition of non-alcoholic drink books, collections of "delicious drinks" that no one could object to. Recipes of this kind belonged to a long tradition of sickroom cookery, in which beef tea, barley water and savory broths were considered nourishment for people who could not manage solid food; a hot cup of something salty was believed to be strengthening in a way modern nutrition does not support, though it does replace fluid and sodium. The bouillon cube itself was still a relative novelty in home kitchens, compressed cube-form bouillon having emerged as a retail product in the early twentieth century, with Maggi and Oxo cubes appearing around 1908-1910; it was Liebig's meat extract, not the cube, that dated to the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The curry powder is the era's small flourish: Anglo-Indian seasoning had been a fixture of English and American pantries for decades, and a dash of it was the standard way to make a plain invalid's broth taste like something.