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Strong Oxcel Celery
Four pounds American Oxcel Beef Extract, ¼ ounce American Celery Tonic Extract, 4 ounces salt, 25 drops tabasco sauce, ¼ ounce American Herb Bouquet, hot water to make 1 gallon. Mix thoroughly and use ½ ounce to each cup of hot water.
This is a fountain syrup in the savoury line: a concentrated beef bouillon base kept behind the counter and let down with hot water to order. Almost every ingredient is a trade-name product, so the work of remaking it is mostly substitution.
- The proportion is the whole recipeHalf an ounce of concentrate to a cup of hot water is roughly a tablespoon to 6-8 oz. Anything stronger tastes of salt and little else, which is the failure mode of every beef-extract drink.
- Oxcel Beef ExtractPresumably a meat extract of the Liebig/Bovril type; the recipe tells us only that it was bought in pound quantities. Modern beef bouillon concentrate or a paste like Bovril is the nearest equivalent; four pounds is a bulk quantity meant to yield a gallon of base.
- American Celery Tonic ExtractA proprietary flavouring essence, not a vegetable. Celery seed steeped in the hot water, or a small quantity of celery salt with the added salt reduced accordingly, will get close to the same note.
- American Herb BouquetA trade herb blend of unknown composition, presumably along bouquet-garni lines. A quarter ounce in a gallon is a whisper; a small muslin bag of dried herbs infused in the hot water and removed is the practical equivalent.
- SaltFour ounces by weight into a gallon, on top of whatever salt the beef extract already carries, and commercial extracts carry a great deal. Mix the base first, taste a made-up cup, and add salt last if it needs it.
- TabascoTwenty-five drops per gallon works out to well under a drop per serving. It is there for warmth on the back of the tongue, not heat.
- Yield and keepingOne gallon of base is about 256 servings at the stated rate -- scale down hard for a home batch. A salted meat concentrate is not shelf-stable once diluted with water; keep the made base refrigerated and use it within a few days.
- ServingHot bouillon of this sort would more likely have gone into a cup or handled mug than a glass; crackers alongside would not be out of place.
Soda fountains did a brisk winter trade in hot savoury drinks, and beef bouillon was a mainstay of it -- a commercial descendant of nineteenth-century beef tea, which physicians had long prescribed to invalids as a restorative. Justus von Liebig's extract of meat, commercialised from the 1860s, helped make the concentrate a factory article, and by the time this book was printed the dispenser could buy meat extract, celery extract and herb essence by the ounce from a supply house. The celery note was not incidental: celery was fashionable in American drinks around 1900, showing up in tonics and phosphates as well as in bouillon, and was widely advertised as soothing to the nerves. A drink like this one sat on the counter as the cold-weather counterpart to the ice-cream soda.