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Tabasco Flip
Three teaspoonfuls oxcel, 5 to 10 drops Tabasco sauce. mug. Season with salt and pepper.
Tea.
Tea at the hot soda fountain can be made in two ways, either fresh made for each customer by keeping a tea canister filled with good tea and a silver filled with good tea and a silver ball handy to the hot soda fountain. When tea is called for put a pinch of tea into the tea ball, place in the cup, and fill the cup with boiling water. Tea ball should remain in the tea for one-half minute to a minute according to the strength the customer desires the drink , and then serve with sugar and cream to taste. The other way is to use American Condensed Tea which has a fine Oolong tip flavor, very delicious and refreshing. Directions: 1 to 2 teaspoonfuls condensed tea in a cup and saucer , add sugar and cream to taste. Serve with a sweet cracker.
The page as printed runs two fountain items together, and the Tabasco Flip has lost a line or two in the setting: it names the flavourings and the seasoning but never states the liquid or the vessel beyond "mug." What follows fills in the gaps that can be filled honestly.
- What "oxcel" isAlmost certainly a concentrated beef-extract preparation of the Bovril or Armour's type, of the sort sold to fountains for hot bouillon service. Beef extract paste or a good bouillon concentrate stands in for it; three teaspoonfuls is a strong dose, several cups' worth of broth by modern labelling.
- The missing stepThe instruction to add liquid appears to have dropped out of the text. The sense of the fragment is that the extract, the Tabasco and the seasoning went into a mug and were filled up with boiling water and stirred; the book gives no quantity, so fill the mug.
- "Flip" and the eggFlips of this period commonly meant a drink shaken or beaten with a whole raw egg. This text does not call for one, and an egg beaten into hot water does not reach a pasteurising temperature, so leave it out.
- Tabasco quantityFive to ten drops in a mug is mild by current palates, and Tabasco has been made continuously since the late 1860s, so the figure can be followed as written. Taste before adding more; the salt in the beef extract carries the heat further than expected.
- Salt and pepperBeef extract is already heavily salted. Season at the end, after tasting.
- A silver"A silver" -- The garbled tea paragraph repeats itself; "a silver" is the same thing as the "silver ball", i.e. a tea ball or infuser. Read it as one implement, not two.
- Tea steeping timeHalf a minute to a minute gives thin, weak tea by modern reckoning; black tea is usually given 3 to 4 minutes off a fresh boil. The short fountain steep suits a customer waiting at the counter.
- American Condensed TeaA concentrated liquid tea extract sold in bottles, long gone from the market. A strong cold-brew or double-strength brewed concentrate, refrigerated, does the same job.
- YieldEach set of quantities makes one mug or cup, one serving.
Between roughly 1890 and the First World War American drugstore fountains often fitted a hot water urn beside the carbonator so they could trade through the winter, and the hot menu leaned on savoury drinks as much as sweet ones: beef tea, clam bouillon, malted milk and tea. A mug of beef extract sharpened with pepper sauce was sold as a restorative rather than a treat, sitting in the same commercial territory as the bouillon cubes and meat extracts then being advertised as nourishment for invalids and office workers. The Tabasco in it came from Avery Island, Louisiana, where the McIlhenny family's pepper sauce is generally traced to the late 1860s. The tea instructions on the same page show the other half of the winter fountain's business, and the closing note to serve a sweet cracker is a reminder that the fountain was competing with the lunch counter.