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Hot Peptonized Beef Tea
About 5 grains crystal pepsin, ½ ounce boiling water. Dissolve, then add cupful hot soda. Serve with pepper and salt. 1 teaspoonful beef bouillon, I
A winter fountain drink rather than a kitchen recipe: hot beef broth dispensed from the soda fountain's hot-water draught, with a pinch of digestive enzyme stirred in. The text as printed is scrambled, with the bouillon measure stranded at the end.
- Read the order of operationsThe working sequence is: dissolve about 5 grains of crystal pepsin in half an ounce of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of beef bouillon extract, then fill with a cupful of hot soda water and season. The trailing "1 teaspoonful beef bouillon" belongs with the ingredients, not the method.
- Grains and ouncesA grain is 64.8 mg, so 5 grains is roughly a third of a gram — a large pinch. Half a fluid ounce is one tablespoon; a fountain "cupful" would have been somewhere in the region of 6 to 8 ounces.
- "Hot soda"Not carbonated water. Fountains of this period had a separate hot-water draught for the winter trade, and "hot soda" meant a cup drawn from it. Plain hot water is the equivalent.
- Beef bouillonThis means concentrated beef extract of the Liebig or Bovril type rather than the clarified broth a cook would make. A teaspoon of modern beef extract or a good bouillon paste gives about the same strength; a stock cube is thinner and saltier.
- The pepsin does nothing hereThe pepsin does little here -- Pepsin works only in acid conditions and loses activity at temperatures well below boiling. Dissolved in boiling water and poured into hot broth, it can have had little or no effect; the name was probably worth more than the enzyme, and it can simply be left out.
- Season at the endBeef extract is already heavily salted. Taste before adding the pepper and salt the recipe calls for.
- YieldOne cup, one serving. It is a savoury hot drink, closer to a mug of consommé than to anything sweet.
Soda fountains of the 1890s and 1900s lost trade every winter, and the answer was a hot menu: beef tea, clam bouillon, hot malted milk and hot chocolate drawn from urns beside the syrup pumps. "Peptonized" was a fashionable word in the same decades, borrowed from invalid cookery, where milk and beef preparations were treated with pepsin or pancreatic extract so that the protein arrived already partly broken down — a practice generally traced to the digestion experiments of the mid-nineteenth century and heavily promoted by pharmaceutical houses selling peptonizing powders and tubes. Since the druggist and the fountain shared a counter, adding a few grains of crystal pepsin to a cup of beef extract cost almost nothing and let the clerk sell an ordinary hot bouillon as something medicinal. Beef tea itself was the standard nourishment for the sick and the convalescent throughout the Victorian period, credited with far more sustaining power than its actual protein content warrants.