Home › At the Fountain › Hot Morocco Maise
Hot Morocco Maise
Into a 5-ounce bouillon cup put ½ ounce hot cocoa paste and 2 teaspoonfuls of malted milk. Fill cup with hot milk, stir briskly to dissolve cocoa and milk and serve with two wafers. Hot Mock Turtle Bouillon, Make an extract of mock turtle by taking 2 ounces extract of beef, 2 ounces concentrated chicken, 8 ounces of clam juice, 3 pints of hot water, 1 ounce tincture of black pepper, 3 drams essence of celery, 1 dram essence of orange peel. Mix and dissolve thoroughly. To dispense, take 2 ounces of the mock turtle extract and ½ ounce sweet cream. Stir while adding hot water. Serve spices.
Two fountain drinks run together in the original text: a hot malted cocoa, and a savory "mock turtle" bouillon built from a keeping extract. Both assume a dispenser's counter stocked with druggist's flavoring tinctures.
- The hinge: hot, not boiledThe recipe calls only for hot milk, and fountain milk was generally held hot rather than boiled. About 160-170F is enough; the original gives no temperature.
- Cocoa pasteNot a modern chocolate ganache. Fountain cocoa paste was cocoa powder, sugar and a little water cooked to a thick syrupy paste and kept warm for the day. Half an ounce is roughly a tablespoon; a tablespoon of good drinking-chocolate mix is the nearest equivalent.
- Malted milkPlain malted milk powder — malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk — not a chocolate malt mix. Two teaspoons is enough to give the drink its faintly toasted, savory edge.
- The 5-ounce bouillon cupA small handled cup, well under a modern mug. The finished drink is about two-thirds of a cup, deliberately short and rich. Doubling the volume without doubling the cocoa and malt gives a thin result.
- Drams and ouncesThese are fluid measures at the fountain: a dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about three-quarters of a teaspoon. Three drams of essence of celery is roughly 2¼ teaspoons; one dram of orange peel essence is not quite a teaspoon.
- Tinctures and essencesTincture of black pepper and essences of celery and orange peel were alcohol-based flavoring concentrates bought from a druggist's supply house and are effectively gone from retail. Culinary bitters, celery seed extract and orange oil are the closest current stand-ins, and all are strong enough that they should be added a few drops at a time rather than by the original dram.
- Extract of beef and concentrated chickenGlass-jar beef extract of the Bovril or Liebig type, and its poultry equivalent. Modern bouillon concentrate pastes work, but they are far saltier by weight, so build the batch with less and taste before adding more.
- Yield and keepingThe mock turtle extract makes a little under two quarts, roughly thirty 2-ounce servings. It contains clam juice and no preservative; refrigerate it and use it within a few days rather than holding it warm on a counter all day as the fountain would have.
- "Serve spices"The line is an instruction to the dispenser to set seasonings out with the cup for the customer, not an ingredient in the drink.
American soda fountains lived in drugstores, and their winter problem was that nobody wants a cold phosphate in February. The answer was a hot menu served in small bouillon cups — malted cocoas, beef teas, clam bouillons — dispensed with the same syrups-and-measures logic as the summer drinks, which is why savory broths here are built from a bottled "extract" rather than a stockpot. Mock turtle borrows its name from the eighteenth-century British soup that imitated green turtle with a calf's head; by 1900 the phrase seems to have drifted well away from that method, often signaling little more than a dark, peppery, spiced broth with a hint of citrus. Malted milk, generally traced to the Horlick brothers' work in Racine, Wisconsin in the early 1880s, was sold first as an invalid and infant food, and its arrival at the fountain kept that medicinal halo — a drink like this one could be ordered as refreshment and defended as nourishment. The fanciful name, as often with fountain names, was likely the dispenser's marketing rather than any claim of Moroccan origin.