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Beef Bouillon Solution
Six ounces American Liquid Beef, ½ ounce powdered mustard, 1 dram black pepper, 10 drops American Herb Bouquet, 1 dram powdered celery, 2 drams bay leaves, 2 ounces salt. Hot water enough to make 1 pint. Mix thoroughly and let stand till cool. Strain through cheese cloth, and use 1 tablespoonful to each glass of bouillon served.
This is a fountain concentrate, not a soup: a pint of heavily salted beef-extract solution meant to be dosed a spoonful at a time into hot water. Everything hinges on the dilution rate, so measure the tablespoon rather than eyeballing it.
- American Liquid BeefA proprietary liquid meat extract of the Liebig/Bovril type sold to fountain operators. Any modern concentrated beef extract paste or liquid works, though most current products are already salted, so cut the added salt sharply and taste before committing the batch.
- American Herb BouquetAnother trade-house product, a compounded herbal flavouring essence, long discontinued. Ten drops of a good celery or mixed-herb extract, or a few drops of Worcestershire, sits in roughly the same place; there is no way to reproduce it exactly.
- DramsThe dram here is a weight, but which dram is uncertain: the avoirdupois dram is 1/16 ounce, about 1.8 g, while the apothecaries' dram used in pharmacy formulas is 1/8 ounce, about 3.9 g. Read either way, the black pepper and the celery come to somewhere between half a teaspoon and a rounded teaspoon of powder each, and 2 drams of bay is a substantial quantity of leaf — several leaves at least — steeped and then strained out.
- The salt is not a misprintTwo ounces is about 57 g in a single pint of concentrate. Spread across the roughly 32 tablespoons that pint yields, that is close to 1.8 g of salt per glass before the beef extract's own sodium is counted. Fountain bouillon was meant to taste bracingly savoury, but modern palates and modern extracts both call for far less.
- Bay and mustardThe recipe does not specify whether the bay is whole or broken; whichever it is, it needs steeping, and the standing-till-cool period does that work. Powdered mustard loses much of its bite once held hot; expect the finished solution to be more aromatic than sharp.
- Straining and yieldCheesecloth catches the bay and the undissolved spice grit, which matters because the finished drink is served clear. One pint yields about 32 servings at a tablespoon each, made up with hot water to a standard 6 to 8 oz glass.
- Keeping itThe original assumes a busy fountain that would work through a pint quickly, and there is no preservative beyond the salt. Refrigerate the strained concentrate and treat it as a week's supply, not a pantry item.
Hot beef bouillon was a staple of the American soda fountain around the turn of the twentieth century, when fountains began pushing hot drinks to keep a counter busy through the winter as well as the summer. The trade depended on commercial meat extracts, descendants of the beef essences popularised by Justus von Liebig's company in the 1860s and marketed as both a restorative and a convenience; fountain supply houses sold branded versions of the separate components, so the operator only had to blend and dilute — which is presumably where names like "American Liquid Beef" and "American Herb Bouquet" come from, though whether both came from the same house is not something the recipe tells us. Beef tea carried a strong association with invalid cookery and nourishment, which suited a counter attached to a pharmacy, and its savoury heat gave temperance-minded customers something to order that was neither sweet nor alcoholic. The compounding style here, with drams and drops and a strain through cheesecloth, is the pharmacist's hand rather than the cook's.