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Malted Milk
Mix a tablespoonful of malted milk in a little cold water, put a raw egg in a shaker, add the malted milk and a glassful of cold milk, flavor as preferred with chocolate or vanilla syrup, shake and serve.
A soda-fountain style egg malted, mixed cold and served immediately. The raw egg is the problem: nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would make it safe.
- Why this one failsThe whole egg goes into the shaker raw and is drunk raw. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella both on the shell and inside the yolk, and neither cold milk nor vigorous shaking reduces it. Use a current recipe if you want a malted drink.
- No dilution effectChilling and mixing with milk does not destroy Salmonella; refrigeration slows bacterial growth but the organism survives, and the drink is never heated at any point.
- Malted milk powderThe tablespoonful is a malt-and-milk powder, still sold plain or chocolate-flavoured. It is not the same as malt extract or malt syrup, which are concentrated barley malt without milk solids and behave quite differently.
- "A glassful"The original gives no volume. A soda-fountain glass of the period ran roughly 8 to 10 ounces, but the measurement is genuinely imprecise.
- "Shaker"A metal cocktail-style shaker or the tall malt cup used with a spindle mixer. The instruction to slake the powder in a little cold water first is sound practice for any malted milk, cooked or not: dry powder dropped straight into cold milk clumps.
- Flavouring syrupsChocolate or vanilla syrup here means a sweetened fountain syrup, not cocoa powder or vanilla extract.
Malted milk began as an infant and invalid food: a dried preparation of malted barley, wheat and milk, generally credited to the Horlick brothers, who marketed it in the 1880s as a nourishing powder that needed only water. Its move from the sickroom to the soda fountain was quick, and by the early twentieth century drugstore counters were selling malteds flavoured with the same syrups used for sodas. Egg drinks were certainly sold at fountains, and adding a raw egg followed the same logic as the powder itself: food in a glass, something strengthening for people who could not or would not eat.