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Buttermilk Pop
Mix two tablespoonfuls of flour with two tablespoonfuls of cold milk to a smooth paste. Put a quart of buttermilk in a double boiler, and when nearly to the boiling point add the flour paste, and stir constantly until boiling. This is excellent for nervous dyspepsia.
Substitute for Milk No. I Beat the yolks of two eggs with one teaspoonful of sugar for five minutes; add one tablespoonful of orange flower water, and beat five minutes longer. Pour in one teacupful of boiling water gradually, stirring all the time, and serve at once.
Two separate preparations run together in one paragraph: a thickened hot buttermilk drink, and a sickroom "substitute for milk" built on egg yolks. The first is straightforward; the second is the problem.
- The egg drink never reaches a safe temperatureTwo raw yolks with a teacupful of boiling water stirred in gradually will land well under the temperature needed to pasteurize egg, and nothing holds it there. It is a raw-yolk beverage served at once, offered as a substitute for milk in a sickroom. Use a current recipe if you want a hot egg drink.
- Keep the buttermilk below a boil until the flour goes inThe instruction to bring it "nearly to the boiling point" in a double boiler is the hinge of the buttermilk pop. Cultured buttermilk curdles readily with direct heat, and the double boiler plus constant stirring is what keeps the finished drink smooth rather than grainy.
- The flour needs a minute of real cooking"Stir constantly until boiling" is the minimum. Give it a further minute or two of gentle bubbling in the double boiler or the drink tastes of raw flour.
- Buttermilk then and nowButtermilk was traditionally the sharp, thin liquid left from churning butter, though cultured buttermilk was also sold commercially by this date. Modern cultured buttermilk is generally thicker, so the pop may come out heavier; thinning with a little whole milk will loosen it.
- Quart and teacupfulA quart is 4 cups, about 950 ml. A teacupful in books of this vintage is smaller than a modern mug; equivalences vary, but somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 fl oz.
- Orange flower waterStill sold, usually in the baking or Middle Eastern aisle. Commercial products vary in strength and a tablespoon can be a great deal; it was a sickroom flavouring meant to make a plain drink palatable.
- YieldThe buttermilk pop makes about a quart, or four servings of a cup each. It is drunk hot and thickens further as it cools.
- "Nervous dyspepsia"A period catch-all for indigestion attributed to nerves. Treat it as a description of the drink's intended audience, not a claim about what it does.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of non-alcoholic drink books that appeared as American prohibition arrived, and this part of it draws on the sickroom tradition rather than the soda fountain. Hot thickened milk and buttermilk drinks of this kind were common in nineteenth-century invalid cookery, promoted as nourishment that a weak stomach could take when solid food could not be managed; buttermilk in particular had a long reputation as a mild, digestible food, and the flour paste here mainly gives it body. The "substitutes for milk" that follow point to the same context, a household nursing someone who could not tolerate ordinary milk. The pairing of temperance drinking and invalid feeding in one volume is characteristic of the moment: both were arguments that a person could be sustained and even comforted without recourse to spirits.