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Oxcel Cocktail
One-quarter ounce oxcel, 10 drops Worcestershire sauce, 5 drops tabasco sauce, 1 teaspoonful lemon juice, hot water to fill mug. Season with salt and pepper, or celery salt.
A hot savoury drink from the fountain trade rather than the bar: "cocktail" here means a mixed drink served in a mug, with no alcohol in it. The whole thing is built on one commercial product, so that is where to start.
- OxcelApparently a proprietary concentrated beef extract of the Bovril and Oxo type. It is not a product you will find today; a modern beef extract or paste-style bouillon concentrate stands in directly. Read the label for salt content before you season.
- A quarter ounceIf read as a fluid measure, that is half a tablespoon, about 1½ teaspoons of a thick paste; by weight it would come to much the same order. If your extract is saltier or milder than the original, adjust by taste rather than by the number.
- The mugBouillon mugs of this kind were generally something in the range of 6 to 8 ounces, which suits the extract quantity. That makes one serving.
- DropsTen drops of Worcestershire is a scant ⅛ teaspoon; five drops of Tabasco is half that again. Precision here is not the point.
- Hot water, not boilingHot water -- the recipe specifies no temperature. Water off the boil will dissolve the extract cleanly, and it is worth avoiding a rolling boil poured straight onto beef extract if you want to keep the aroma.
- Order of workThe recipe gives no sequence. Slaking the extract to a smooth paste with a splash of hot water before adding the sauces and lemon juice, then filling, avoids leaving an undissolved lump in the bottom of the mug.
- SeasoningOf the two options given, celery salt gives the drink a family resemblance to the tomato-and-Worcestershire style of savoury drink. Salt last, since the extract already carries a good deal.
Hot bouillon was standard winter business at the American soda fountain: ice cream trade collapsed in cold weather, and a mug of beef tea kept the marble counter earning through the cold months. It rested on the concentrated meat extracts that followed Justus von Liebig's work on beef extract, generally traced to the 1840s and 1850s, with Liebig's Extract of Meat Company founded in 1865, and on the commercial pastes that came after it, of which Bovril is the survivor best known to modern shoppers. "Oxcel" was one of many such proprietary brands competing for the fountain and drugstore market. The addition of Worcestershire, Tabasco and lemon marks the drink as belonging to the savoury-cocktail idiom of the fountain counter, where the methods of the bar were applied to clam juice, tomato and beef tea; the same gestures later reappear in the vodka-and-bouillon drinks of mid-century America.