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Hot Cream Boviline
One ounce extract of beef and 2 ounces cream. Add hot water, and serve pepper and salt.
A fountain drink rather than a soup: hot beef broth softened with cream, mixed to order in a mug at the counter. The whole thing takes under a minute once you know what "extract of beef" meant behind the bar.
- What "extract of beef" wasFountains kept either a jar of concentrated meat paste (Liebig's, Bovril, Armour's) or a ready-diluted beef extract syrup drawn from a bottle. Bovril or a beef bouillon paste is the closest current stand-in; a stock cube crushed and dissolved also works, though it is saltier.
- The one ounce is ambiguousAn ounce of undiluted meat paste would make a mug of broth undrinkably strong and salty, so the original almost certainly means a fluid ounce of the fountain's pre-diluted beef extract. Start with about a teaspoon of paste per mug and build up rather than measuring by the ounce.
- Cream measureTwo ounces is a quarter cup. Half-and-half or light cream is the closest match; heavy cream will read as greasy in a hot savoury drink.
- Hot water, not boilingNo quantity is given. Filling a mug of about 6 to 8 oz puts the finished drink at roughly two to three parts water to one part cream. Water just off the boil keeps the cream from breaking or forming a skin.
- Order of assemblyDissolve the extract in a little of the hot water first, then add the rest, then the cream last. Cream poured onto neat paste tends to leave undissolved specks.
- Season at the counter"Serve pepper and salt" most likely means the seasoning went to the customer rather than into the mug. Either way, taste before adding any salt, since modern beef pastes and cubes are heavily salted already.
- YieldOne mug, one serving. It does not hold; the cream separates and a skin forms within a few minutes of standing.
Hot beef drinks were a standard part of the American soda fountain's cold-weather trade, sold alongside hot chocolate, hot lemonade and clam bouillon to keep the marble counter earning in months when nobody wanted ice cream. They depended on the commercial meat extracts that spread through the second half of the nineteenth century — Liebig's Extract of Meat, marketed from the 1860s, and the British Bovril that followed — products sold as much as invalid tonics and restoratives as flavourings, which is why a druggist's fountain stocked them without embarrassment. Names like "Boviline" belong to that world of proprietary-sounding fountain coinages, where a drink was given a trade-flavoured label whether or not any trademark stood behind it. The cream is the fountain's own contribution: the dispenser had it at hand for every other drink on the list, and adding it turned a cup of plain beef tea into something that could be charged for as a specialty.