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Cream of Beef Bouillon
Add 1 ounce of sweet cream to a cup of beef bouillon and top with whipped cream and you have a delicious drink.
A two-ingredient fountain drink that depends entirely on the quality of the bouillon and on keeping the cream unsweetened. Everything else is assembly.
- "Sweet cream" means fresh creamIn fountain usage sweet cream is simply cream that has not soured and has not been whipped — ordinary heavy or light cream. It carries no sugar.
- One ounce is two tablespoonsOne fluid ounce of cream is two tablespoons. Into a cup of bouillon that is roughly a 1:8 ratio, enough to soften the salt without making it taste like soup.
- The bouillonThis assumes a strong clear beef broth held hot, or a beef extract such as Bovril or Armour's dissolved in hot water. Modern bouillon cubes can be very salty; consider making it weaker than the package directs, since the cream will not mask salt.
- Heat, not boilingAdd the cream to bouillon that is hot but off the boil. Hard boiling after the cream goes in risks separating it.
- Keep the whipped cream plainWhip cream to soft peaks with no sugar and no vanilla. A little white pepper or celery salt beaten in suits the drink better than anything sweet.
- Yield and serviceOne drink. Serve in a warmed cup with a spoon.
Soda fountains did brisk business in winter, and one answer to cold weather was hot beef tea — a cup of clear bouillon drawn from an urn, sometimes seasoned with celery salt and served with a cracker. Concentrated beef extracts, marketed from the late nineteenth century onward as restoratives for invalids and the overworked, made this easy for a dispenser who already had hot water on hand, and beef bouillon appears in fountain guides alongside hot malted milk and hot chocolate. Adding cream and a cap of whipped cream is the fountain's characteristic move: take a plain thing and dress it the way a soda would be dressed, so that it looks like it belongs on the same marble counter. The result sits at the edge of what a modern drinker finds appealing, but it explains why the drugstore counter was understood as a place for refreshment in general rather than sweets alone.