Home › At the Fountain › Hot Beef Tea
Hot Beef Tea
Put half a teaspoonful of American Oxcel into a cup, fill the cup with hot water, stir well, and add salt and pepper to suit.
A single-cup fountain drink built on a proprietary meat extract. The only real work is sourcing the extract and getting the dilution right.
- American OxcelEvidently a proprietary beef extract preparation; the title 'Hot Beef Tea' is the only guide to what it was. Any modern beef extract paste in the Bovril or Better Than Bouillon mould stands in directly; a beef bouillon cube will also work, though cubes are far saltier and you should hold back the added salt.
- StrengthHalf a teaspoon to a full cup is a light dose. Extracts vary in concentration, so taste and adjust rather than trusting the measure; a rounded teaspoon suits most modern pastes.
- Cup sizePeriod fountain cups were generally smaller than a modern 12 oz mug, on the order of 6 to 8 oz. Around 6 oz of water suits the stated half teaspoon.
- Water temperatureWater just off the boil dissolves extract pastes more readily than merely hot water; the recipe calls for stirring well in any case.
- SeasoningSalt last and sparingly. Commercial extracts are already heavily salted, so the pepper is likely to do more for the drink than extra salt; the recipe leaves both 'to suit'.
- YieldOne cup, made to order. There is nothing to be gained by mixing a batch in advance; it separates and dulls as it stands.
Beef tea was one of the nineteenth century's standard invalid foods, spooned into convalescents and anyone thought to need building up, and it began as a genuine kitchen operation — lean beef shredded and steeped for hours in water kept below a simmer. What made a version like this possible was the commercial meat extract, generally traced to Justus von Liebig's work in the 1840s and 1850s and to Liebig's Extract of Meat Company, founded in 1865; by the end of the century half a dozen brands sold dark, salty concentrates in jars and tins. Soda fountains, which had a constant supply of hot water for their winter trade, picked the product up gladly: it is often said to have let a dispenser serve something savoury and reputedly wholesome to customers who wanted neither ice cream nor a phosphate, and it earned a place among the hot drinks in books like this one alongside beef bouillon, clam broth and hot malted milk.