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Egg Bouillon (One-fourth ounce oxcel beef)
One-fourth ounce oxcel beef tea, I fresh egg, boiling hot water to make 8 ounces. Salt and pepper. Beat up rapidly and serve.
A hot fountain drink rather than a soup, built in the glass from beef extract and a whole raw egg. The method is the problem: nothing here reaches a temperature that would make the egg safe.
- Why it failsA single fresh egg is beaten into the glass with the extract and boiling water, and served immediately. There is no cooking step and no measured temperature: depending on the glass, the volume of water and how fast it is served, the mixture may or may not reach a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella, and it is certainly not held there. The egg is deliberately not allowed to set.
- Beaten, not cookedThe instruction "beat up rapidly and serve" most likely exists to keep the egg from curdling into threads, which is the texture the drink depends on and the reason it cannot be brought to a safe temperature without ruining it. If you want a hot egg-and-broth drink, use a current recipe written with a measured temperature.
- Oxcel beef teaA proprietary concentrated beef preparation of the period, in the same family as the meat extracts still on shelves today. No modern product is a direct equivalent, and the form of the quarter-ounce dose is not specified by the recipe.
- Fountain ouncesThe 8 ounces are the finished volume of the drink, a single serving rather than a batch.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are added to the glass, not to a pan.
Hot drinks were an important part of the American soda fountain's winter trade, and beef tea sat on the same list as hot chocolate and hot lemonade because it was understood less as refreshment than as restorative -- beef extract was marketed for decades as invalid and convalescent food, the thing you gave someone who could not face solid meat. Adding a raw egg to a fountain drink was familiar enough in this era: egg phosphates, egg lemonades and egg malteds all appear alongside this one, the egg treated as a nourishing thickener that gave body and a paler colour. The combination of extract and egg in one glass is essentially a drinkable version of the beef-tea-and-egg preparations that appear in nineteenth-century sickroom cookery, transplanted to the drugstore counter, where the soda clerk doubled as a dispenser of mild remedies.