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Hot Beef-Egg
Break fresh egg into mixing glass and shake well without ice. Pour into bouillon cup, add ½ ounce beef tea extract, draw hot water to fill cup and serve with 2 graham wafers, pepper and salt.
This is a fountain "hot drink" built on a raw egg that never gets cooked. The terms are worth decoding, but the drink itself belongs to a period before egg-borne Salmonella was understood.
- The egg is never cookedA whole raw egg is shaken, dropped into a cup, and topped with hot water from the fountain tap. Hot water drawn from a tap and poured over a cold egg and a spoonful of extract in a room-temperature cup will not hold the egg at any temperature that kills Salmonella, and the drink is consumed at once. If you want a hot beef broth with egg, use a current recipe that cooks or pasteurizes the egg.
- Shaking without iceThe instruction "shake well without ice" most likely serves to break up and aerate the egg so it disperses rather than sitting in the cup as a slick lump. It does nothing for safety.
- Beef tea extractA concentrated meat extract of the Bovril and Liebig type. The nearest current equivalent is a spoonable beef bouillon concentrate or a glossy demi-glace paste; a half ounce is roughly a tablespoon.
- The bouillon cupA two-handled cup, generally on the order of 6 to 8 ounces, smaller than a modern mug.
- Graham wafersThin, plain graham crackers, less sweet than today's honey grahams. Here they play the part the crackers played beside a bowl of soup at a lunch counter.
- Where it sat on the menuThis is a single serving made to order rather than a batch made at home. The pepper and salt are served with the drink rather than mixed into it.
American soda fountains ran hot as well as cold, and by the early twentieth century a fountain might offer a hot-water tap and beef and clam broths listed beside the sundaes; winter trade was thin otherwise. Beef tea itself came out of nineteenth-century invalid cookery, where concentrated meat extract was believed to carry the "strength" of beef in drinkable form, an idea popularized by the commercial extracts of the 1860s onward and only later undercut by nutritional chemistry, which found them long on flavor and salt and short on protein. Adding a raw egg followed the same logic that produced the egg phosphate and the eggnog at the same counter: the egg was regarded as a cheap, complete nourishment that could be slipped into any drink, a habit that survived in fountain manuals for decades before fading. That this appears in a dispenser's guide rather than a cookbook is the point, since it is a formula for a soda clerk working from behind the marble, in the language of ounces drawn and cups filled.