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Beef Sangree
One teaspoonful oxcel beef extract, ¼ teaspoonful Worcestershire sauce (without shaking bottle), 2 drops tabasco, I piece lemon peel. Hot water to fill cup. Serve with salt, pepper, etc.
A hot savoury drink from the soda fountain's winter menu, closer to a Bloody Mary without the vodka than to anything sweet. It takes about a minute to build once you have the beef extract.
- Oxcel beef extractEvidently a proprietary concentrated beef extract of the sort sold for making beef tea, though the brand is not well documented. Any modern beef extract or concentrated beef base works; one teaspoon to a cup is about right, though bases vary in salt so taste before seasoning.
- "Without shaking bottle"Worcestershire settles, and the instruction presumably means to draw the clear liquid from the top rather than rousing the sediment.
- Cup sizeA fountain cup of the period held roughly 6 to 8 fl oz, so figure that much hot water. Serves one.
- Water temperatureThe recipe specifies only hot water; water just off the boil rather than at a hard boil will preserve more of the Worcestershire's aroma.
- Two drops of TabascoMeasure it as drops, not shakes. Two drops in a cup reads as warmth at the back of the throat; a careless shake of three or four times that will bury the beef.
- Lemon peelA pared strip of zest with no white pith, twisted over the cup so the oil sprays across the surface, then dropped in.
- Serve with salt, pepper, etc.The seasoning was left to the drinker, the shakers going out alongside the cup.
A sangaree is properly a wine drink: the word comes into English in the eighteenth century from Spanish sangría, and in nineteenth-century American bar books it means wine or ale sweetened, spiced and dusted with nutmeg. By the time soda fountains were writing their own manuals the name had been stretched well beyond wine, and a fountain applied it to hot beef extract. Drinks like this one belong to the era when the drugstore fountain was as much a dispensary as a treat counter: beef tea was prescribed to invalids and convalescents as strengthening food in liquid form, and selling it hot across the counter in winter kept the marble busy in the months when nobody wanted ice cream. The Worcestershire, Tabasco and lemon are the soda man's contribution, turning a sickroom broth into something a customer would order for pleasure.