Home › At the Fountain › Beef Tea
Beef Tea
One or 2 teaspoonfuls American Oxcel, hot water enough to fill cup. Serve in a fine china cup. American Celery Salt shaken from a cut-glass or silver-plated salt bottle is an agreeable addition; so is herb bouquet. Both greatly improve the beverage. Some people also like 1 or 2 drops of Worcestershire sauce.
A fountain drink rather than a kitchen dish: hot beef extract dissolved in water and dressed at the counter. Everything depends on the extract itself, since the recipe is essentially a dilution ratio.
- American OxcelEvidently a proprietary beef extract of the sort sold to soda fountains, in the same family as Liebig's Extract of Meat and Bovril. Substitute a concentrated beef extract paste or a good bouillon paste at 1 to 2 teaspoons per cup.
- Strength and cup sizeThe "cup" here is a small china cup, considerably smaller than a modern 12-ounce mug. Scaled up to a modern mug the drink comes out thin; add extract to taste rather than water to volume.
- Water temperatureHot water, as from a fountain urn. Very hot water is not needed; water short of a hard boil dissolves the paste cleanly.
- SaltBeef extract pastes are already heavily salted. Taste before reaching for the celery salt, or the drink will be brackish.
- American Celery SaltAnother branded fountain product, but ordinary celery salt does the same job. A shake, not a spoonful.
- Herb bouquetIn this fountain context it most likely means a bottled savory seasoning blend rather than a tied bundle of fresh herbs. A pinch of dried thyme, parsley and bay ground fine gets close; anything tied and simmered is out of place in a drink poured to order.
- StirringExtract paste clings to the bottom of the cup. Work it to a slurry with a splash of hot water first, then fill, or the last mouthful will be a salt slick.
- YieldOne serving. There is nothing to batch here beyond keeping the water hot.
Beef tea belonged as much to the sickroom as to the lunch counter. Through the second half of the nineteenth century it was the standard invalid food, pressed on convalescents, nursing mothers and anyone thought to be run down, on the then-current belief that the soluble extract of meat carried its nourishment. Justus von Liebig's commercial meat extract, marketed from the 1860s, turned what had been a tedious kitchen process of simmering and skimming lean beef into a spoonful from a jar, and a crowd of branded rivals followed. American soda fountains, which sold themselves as year-round establishments rather than summer trade, took up hot beef tea alongside clam bouillon and hot chocolate as a cold-weather counter drink, and the fittings named here -- the fine china cup, the cut-glass or silver-plated salt bottle -- are the point as much as the liquid is. The nutritional claim did not survive analysis: beef extract is largely salt and savory compounds with very little protein, which is why it now sits in the pantry as a flavoring rather than in the medicine chest.