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Oxcel Egg-Nog
Two teaspoonfuls oxcel, 1 teaspoonful sugar, 1 egg, a pinch of salt, in I slightly, add salt and sugar, mix oxcel in tablespoonful brandy. Beat eggs slightly, add salt and sugar, mix oxcel hot water, add to egg and brandy, strain and serve with nutmeg on top.
This is a fountain "eggnog" of the hot-beef-broth school, and the printed text has plainly been scrambled at the compositor's desk. Two points about the source, and one about why it should not be mixed today.
- Why not to make itThe egg is beaten raw, and the only heat is hot water added to a cold mixture that is then strained and served at once; the recipe never states how much water. That cannot be relied on to bring egg to a temperature that addresses Salmonella, and the drink is not cooked afterward. If you want a hot eggnog, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or pasteurized eggs.
- The text is corruptThe line "in I slightly, add salt and sugar, mix oxcel in tablespoonful brandy" is a duplicated and displaced fragment of the sentence that follows. The intended reading is roughly: two teaspoonfuls oxcel, one teaspoonful sugar, one egg, a pinch of salt, one tablespoonful brandy. Some quantity of hot water is called for but never stated, so the dilution is genuinely unknown.
- OxcelEvidently a proprietary preparation to be dissolved in hot water. The name points toward a concentrated beef extract of the sort sold alongside Bovril and Vigoral for hot savory cups at the counter, but the recipe does not identify it and nothing here confirms what it was. No modern product is a direct substitute.
- What the drink actually wasWhat the drink may have been -- There is no milk in the ingredients, so despite the name this is not a dairy eggnog. If oxcel was indeed a meat extract, the result would be a hot savory cup with a raw egg beaten in and brandy added, nearer an invalid's beef tea than a Christmas punch; the nutmeg on top is the one element it shares with the dairy version.
- YieldApparently a single glass, on the strength of the one egg; the recipe states no yield, and with the water quantity missing the finished volume is unknown.
Soda fountains did a steady winter trade in hot drinks, and the beef extract cup was the backbone of it: a spoonful of concentrated meat extract, hot water, salt, and whatever the house added to dress it up. Brands such as Bovril and Vigoral were sold for this trade, and fountain manuals list variations under names like beef tea, bouillon, and clam bouillon. The egg-nog format, borrowed from the milk-and-brandy drink, gave the counterman a way to sell the same beef extract as something richer and more restorative, which was the whole commercial premise of the drugstore fountain in that period: the line between a refreshment and a tonic was deliberately left blurred.