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Egg Bouillon (One-half to ounce liquid)
One-half to 1 ounce liquid extract of beef, 1 egg, salt and pepper to season, hot water to fill an 8-ounce mug. Stir the extract, egg and seasoning together 8-ounce mug. Stir the extract, egg and seasoning together with a spoon to get well mixed, add the water, stirring briskly meanwhile; then strain and serve. Or shake the egg and extract in the shaker, add the water, and mix by pouring back and forth several times from shaker to mug. One egg, 1 ounce beef tea extract, ½ spoonful dairy butter. Add several ounces hot water and stir until the butter is dissolved. Fill up with hot
A hot fountain drink from the era when the soda counter doubled as a health bar. The formula is straightforward, but its central technique — a whole raw egg slackened with hot water — is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The egg is never cookedThe egg is never reliably cooked -- Hot water poured into a mug over a raw egg and an ounce of extract may set some of the egg (the instruction to strain suggests threads did form), but there is no way to know that the mixture holds a pasteurizing temperature for long enough, and it cools within seconds. What reaches the drinker should be treated as largely raw egg in warm broth. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, and beef bouillon was commonly served to invalids, convalescents and the elderly — the people least able to tolerate it. Use a current recipe if you want a hot egg drink.
- "Liquid extract of beef"The concentrated meat extracts of the period — Liebig's, Bovril, Armour's — were sold as dark pastes or syrups and were usually dosed by the teaspoon. One ounce is a very heavy hand, and an ounce of a modern beef base or bouillon concentrate in an 8-ounce mug would be punishingly salty.
- "Beef tea extract" versus beef teaThe two names in this entry are not the same thing. Beef tea proper was fresh beef steeped in water and strained, made daily in the sickroom; beef tea extract is the bottled commercial concentrate. The recipe uses the shorthand loosely.
- The ambiguous "½ spoonful"The ambiguous "½ spoonful" -- No spoon size is given, and the original offers no guide to which spoon is meant. The butter is presumably there for richness and body, so the quantity is likely small — but the original does not say how small.
- The 8-ounce mugA standard fountain mug, roughly one modern cup of finished drink. The extract, egg and butter together come to around three ounces of that, so the drink is mostly hot water.
- The garbled lineThe phrase "8-ounce mug. Stir the extract, egg and seasoning together" is repeated in the original — a compositor's duplication, not a second step.
- YieldOne mug per formula; the entry gives two.
Hot drinks were a serious part of the American soda fountain's winter trade, and beef bouillon sat on the same list as hot chocolate, clam broth and hot lemonade. Concentrated meat extracts had been commercially available since the middle of the nineteenth century — Liebig's Extract of Meat is the best known — and were marketed less as food than as restorative tonic, on the then-current belief that the essence of beef carried its strength in soluble form. A raw egg was often added to such preparations, supplying the nourishment the extract in fact did not, since meat extract is largely salt, gelatin and flavour compounds with almost no protein.