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Celery Tonic (For use in hot beef tea dilute)
For use in hot beef tea, dilute American Celery Tonic Extract with half water, and squirt from an essence bottle.
This is a fountain dispensing note rather than a full formula: it assumes a bottled proprietary extract and a steam-heated beef bouillon urn. Both need translating before it means anything in a kitchen.
- American Celery Tonic ExtractApparently a proprietary soda-fountain concentrate; fountain extracts of this type were generally celery flavour carried in a sweetened alcoholic or glycerine base, though the actual formula here is unknown. It has no modern equivalent on shelves; celery bitters, or a strong infusion of bruised celery seed in simple syrup, gets you closest in character.
- "Dilute with half water"Most naturally read as cutting the extract with an equal volume of water, i.e. a 1:1 working solution, though the phrase could also mean half the extract's volume of water. The original does not say whether the water should be hot or cold; cold would be the practical choice for a stock bottle, since the drink itself supplies the heat.
- Essence bottleA small glass bottle with a bulb or narrow spout that delivers a squirt or dash; the volume was not standardised. Any dropper or small squeeze bottle does the same job.
- Hot beef teaNot tea in any sense. Beef tea was beef broth, or a spoonful of meat extract in hot water, and was among the hot drinks fountains offered. Use a well-seasoned, fat-free beef consomme.
- DoseThe recipe implies a squirt per cup, so the tonic is a seasoning here rather than a base. Celery seed can turn bitter in quantity, so start with a very small amount of the diluted extract and build up.
- SaltIf the extract carries any salt of its own, taste the finished mug before adding more. Broth plus celery salt plus tonic will run saline very quickly.
Around 1900 the American soda fountain did a substantial trade in hot drinks as well as cold, and beef tea sat in the urn beside the coffee as a restorative for anyone feeling delicate — the same logic that made beef extracts a fixture of the sickroom. Celery was in a parallel boom: the stalks themselves were a fashionable and fairly expensive table vegetable, and celery seed and root carried a long reputation as a nerve and kidney tonic, which is why druggists bottled celery extracts alongside sarsaparilla and kola. The pairing here looks medicinal in intent, a savoury pick-me-up rather than a treat. The soda-water side of the same fashion outlived the beef tea: celery tonic survives in bottled form as Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, still made and still tasting of celery seed.