Home › Beverages › Malted Milk with Wine
Malted Milk with Wine
4 tablespoons Horlick's malted milk 2 tablespoons sherry 1 teaspoon of sugar 2 cups hot water Mix the malted milk with enough cold water to make a smooth paste, then add gradually the hot water, wine, and the sugar.
A two-cup invalid's drink of the malted-milk era, easy to reproduce as long as the powder is handled cold first.
- Make the paste coldThe hinge is the order of operations: malted milk powder lumps badly if hot water hits it first, and the lumps are hard to work out again. Work 4 tablespoons to a smooth, loose paste with a tablespoon or two of cold water, then thin it with the hot water in a slow stream.
- Horlick's malted milkThe original is a powder of malted barley and wheat extract with dried milk. Modern Horlick's and equivalent malted milk powders still contain milk solids and work the same way; a plain malt powder or malt-flavoured extract without milk solids will give a thin, watery cup.
- Water temperatureThe recipe asks only for hot water, not boiling; water short of the boil dissolves the powder perfectly well.
- The sherryTwo tablespoons of a medium or cream sherry suits the sweetness of the malt better than a dry fino. Add it after the hot water, off the heat, so the aroma is not driven off.
- SugarOne teaspoon is a starting point. Malted milk powders vary a good deal in sweetness, so taste before adding it.
- YieldRoughly 2 1/4 cups.
Malted milk was a proprietary food before it was a soda-fountain flavour: the powder is generally traced to the brothers James and William Horlick, who began in Chicago in 1873 and soon moved their manufacture to Racine, Wisconsin, marketing a dried malted-barley-and-milk preparation as an easily digested food for infants and invalids. Because a spoonful in hot water made a nourishing drink with no cooking and no fresh milk on hand, it became a fixture of sickroom and camp cookery, and Horlick's was named in cookbooks as a proprietary shorthand for the ingredient. The added sherry places this in the older tradition of wine whey and other fortified invalid drinks, which were given to convalescents as a stimulant and appetite-rouser; recipes of this kind became less common in American cookbooks after national Prohibition took effect in January 1920.