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Hot Lactated Beef
One teaspoonful aromatic extract beef, 1 teaspoonful fresh cream, 1 dash extract of celery, 1 cupful hot water. Season with pepper and salt.
A hot savoury drink from the soda fountain era, when the same counter that poured phosphates also served beef bouillon in a mug through the winter. It comes together in under a minute once you know what the three extracts are.
- Aromatic extract of beefThis is concentrated beef extract of the Liebig/Bovril type, sold in jars as a dark, salty paste. A modern equivalent is a teaspoon of beef extract or a good bouillon concentrate; ordinary stock is far too weak to substitute spoon for spoon.
- Extract of celeryA fountain flavouring essence, not celery juice. A few drops of celery bitters or the smallest pinch of celery salt gets you to the same place, but hold back on the added salt if you use the latter.
- "Lactated"Here the word appears to refer to the spoonful of cream, in the manner of the many 'lactated' products of the period. The single teaspoon is enough to soften the harshness of the extract and give the cup a little body, not to turn it into a cream soup.
- A dashAt the fountain a dash was simply what came from a tilted dash-bottle, a few drops rather than a measured amount. With a strong celery essence, start small.
- Water temperatureHot rather than boiling. Beef extract dissolves readily in hot water, and boiling water tends to flatten the aroma.
- Order of workDissolve the extract in a little of the hot water first, then fill the cup, then stir in the cream last. Dropping cream into undissolved paste leaves streaks and lumps at the bottom of the mug.
- SeasoningBeef extract is already very salty, so taste before adding anything. White pepper has the advantage of leaving no dark specks in the cup.
- YieldOne cup, one serving. It is meant to be drunk from the mug rather than eaten with a spoon.
Soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not only cold-drink counters; they were expected to earn their keep in January as well as July, and hot beef tea, clam bouillon and hot malted milk filled the winter half of the trade. The beef came from concentrated meat extract, a product popularised after Justus von Liebig's work on the subject in the mid-1800s and sold commercially in Britain and America under several brand names by the time this book appeared. Such drinks carried a distinctly medicinal air: beef tea was widely prescribed for invalids and convalescents, and the fountain, which usually shared premises with a drug store, was well placed to sell it to the merely tired. The "lactated" label follows the same fashion, echoing the lactated infant foods and tonics of the period, in which a spoonful of cream or milk sugar was taken as a mark of nourishment.