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Mulled Milk
1 pint (2 cups) milk 2 egg yolks I oz. (I heaping table- I inch cinnamon stick spoonful) sugar Put the milk and cinnamon stick into a fireproof pan, bring to boiling point, and boil for four minutes. Mix the yolks of the eggs, sugar, and three tablespoonfuls of cold milk together; strain the hot milk and add it to the eggs, then stir it over the fire until it begins to thicken-it must not boil; pour it several times from one earthenware pitcher to another. 12 oysters
A stirred custard thin enough to drink, from the invalid-cookery chapter. Everything depends on keeping it below a simmer once the eggs go in.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks are added, hold the mixture between 170F and 180F and stir constantly; at that point it coats a spoon and the eggs are safely set. A few degrees higher and the yolk proteins seize into scrambled threads that no amount of stirring will bring back.
- Boiling the milk four minutesThat step draws flavour from the cinnamon, and boiling milk also had the incidental effect of making doubtful milk safer in the period. With pasteurised milk it is purely infusion, and a covered pan off the heat for ten minutes extracts more cinnamon with less scorching.
- An ounce of sugarThe book's "1 oz., 1 heaping tablespoonful" is about 2 level tablespoons by modern measure. Weight is the reliable figure here; the book's spoonful is a heaping one.
- Tempering"Add the hot milk to the eggs" means pour it in slowly while whisking, not all at once. The three tablespoons of cold milk beaten into the yolks first exist for the same reason, to slow the temperature climb.
- Pouring between pitchersIt aerates the drink, gives it a light froth, and drops the temperature to something a sick person can swallow. Two warmed jugs, held well apart, do it best.
- The stray oystersThe "12 oysters" at the end has nothing to do with this recipe; it appears to be a fragment carried over from an adjacent one. Ignore it.
- YieldAbout two cups, or two invalid servings. It thickens further as it cools and is meant to be drunk warm, not chilled.
Invalid cookery was a standard division of the household cookbook well into the twentieth century, on the assumption that the sickroom tray came out of the same kitchen as dinner and needed its own short, digestible repertoire: beef tea, gruel, barley water, and drinks like this one. Mulled milk sits in a long line of English milk-and-egg restoratives that runs back through the posset and the caudle, warm spiced drinks thickened with egg and often laced with wine or ale; the invalid version drops the alcohol and keeps the nourishment. "Mulled" simply means warmed and spiced, the same sense it carries in mulled wine. Milk, eggs and sugar were often said to be the concentrated foods a patient could take when solids were refused, and the pouring from pitcher to pitcher, a gesture shared with chocolate-making and with Spanish and Latin American drink service, served the practical end of cooling the cup to drinking heat without a thermometer.