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Mild Oxcel Celery
Eight ounces American Oxcel Beef Extract, ½ ounce cornstarch, 1 ounce salt, ½ ounce American Celery Tonic Extract, ⅛ ounce American Herb Bouquet, hot water enough to make i quart. Stir the starch with a small quantity of water and mix thoroughly, then add the balance of water and other ingredients. Use ½ ounce with each cup of hot water.
This is a fountain concentrate, not a finished drink: you build a quart of seasoned beef-extract syrup and dispense half an ounce at a time into hot water. Almost all the work of translating it lies in the proprietary bottled extracts, which no longer exist under these names.
- What the extracts were"American Oxcel Beef Extract" appears to have been a proprietary meat extract of the kind supplied to druggists, in the Liebig/Bovril family; whether it was sold as a paste or a liquid is not stated here. A modern beef extract paste or a concentrated beef base is the nearest equivalent, though brands differ enormously in salt and thickness.
- Celery tonic and herb bouquet"American Celery Tonic Extract" was presumably a celery flavouring of the sort used for celery soda, and "Herb Bouquet" some compound herb flavouring; the exact make-up of neither is recorded here. Celery-seed extract or a small quantity of celery bitters stands in for the first; the second is guesswork, and a light infusion of bay, thyme and parsley is as defensible a substitute as any.
- Ounces here are weight, not volumeOunces here are ambiguous -- fountain formulas mix weight and fluid measure, and the text does not say which is meant. If the eight ounces of beef extract is a weight (roughly 225 g), that is a great deal of concentrate for a quart; the half-ounce dispensing dose is more likely a fluid ounce.
- SaltOne ounce (about 28 g) of salt goes into the whole quart, and each serving takes only half an ounce of that quart — under half a gram of added salt per cup. The beef extract carries substantial sodium of its own, so taste before adding any at all if your base is a modern commercial one.
- The cornstarch is for body, and it has to be cookedThe cornstarch is for body -- Half an ounce (about 14 g) of starch in a quart gives the drink the faint viscosity that made fountain bouillon feel like broth rather than salt water. The recipe only slakes the starch in a little water before adding the balance of hot water; if it does not thicken and settles out, bring the finished quart to a simmer for a minute or two.
- YieldA quart of concentrate at half an ounce per cup is roughly sixty-four servings — a fountain's day, not a household's. Scale down hard, and refrigerate what you make; this is a meat stock with no preservative beyond salt.
- ServingDispensed in a fountain mug with hot water, often with crackers. The drink should be savoury and clear-tasting; if it reads as bouillon cube, the extract is doing too much of the work and the celery too little.
Hot bouillon at the soda fountain was a winter trade, and a commercially minded one: fountains built on iced drinks had little to sell in the cold months, and beef tea, clam bouillon and hot malted milk were how they kept the counter busy. The formula depends on the late-nineteenth-century boom in concentrated meat extracts and its many imitators, including the branded "Oxcel" named here — which turned beef tea from an invalid's slow-simmered kitchen chore into something a soda clerk could serve in twenty seconds. That it appears in a soda book rather than a cookbook is the point: drinks like this sat at the junction of the drugstore and the lunch counter, sold as strengthening and wholesome in the same breath as they were sold as refreshment, and the "mild" in the title likely refers to the seasoning level of this particular formula.