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Oxcel-a Fluid Beef
Place 1 or 2 teaspoonfuls in a fine china cup, add enough hot water from the draft tube to make 6 ounces. Shake from silver or cut glass bottles, salt, pepper, and a small quantity of American Celery Salt. Add a few drops of Worcestershire sauce. A dash of American Herb Bouquet gives a delicious flavor.
A hot beef-extract drink served over the counter, closer to a cup of bouillon than anything sweet. Nothing here needs adjusting except the vocabulary and the shopping list.
- OxcelA proprietary "fluid beef" — a concentrated beef extract sold for exactly this purpose. Any modern beef extract paste (Bovril, Oxo concentrate, or a good beef base) does the same job; the original allows 1 or 2 teaspoonfuls to 6 ounces of water, so start with one and add more to taste.
- The draft tubeThe soda fountain's hot-water outlet. At home, hot water from the kettle does the job.
- 6 ouncesThree-quarters of a cup. This is a single serving meant to be drunk, not a soup portion.
- Shake from silver or cut glass bottlesFountain dressing, not technique — the seasonings were kept in shaker bottles on the counter. Season to taste and check before adding salt at all, since beef extract is already heavily salted.
- American Celery Salt and American Herb BouquetApparently proprietary products of the book's era. Celery salt is still sold and is the same thing; what went into the "herb bouquet" is not stated here. A pinch of mixed dried herbs stands in for it.
- Order of workPut the extract in the cup first and add the water over it, whisking briefly with a spoon. Extract dropped into a full cup sits at the bottom in a lump and the last mouthfuls come out oversalted.
- Fine chinaWarm the cup before filling it; only 6 ounces of liquid loses heat fast in a cold vessel.
Concentrated "fluid beef" was one of the great commercial foods of the late nineteenth century — for invalids, travellers and anyone thought to need building up, and marketed with claims about strength and digestibility that its actual protein content did not support. American soda fountains picked it up because it solved a seasonal problem: the fountain's trade collapsed in cold weather, so proprietors added hot drinks served from the same counter and the same hot-water tap used for hot sodas. Beef bouillon, hot clam broth and hot malted milk all appear in fountain manuals of this period alongside the sundaes. The listing of specific proprietary names — Oxcel, American Celery Salt, American Herb Bouquet — is a reminder that books like this one were part trade manual, part advertisement for the supply houses that stocked the fountain.