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Hot Coffee Souffle
To the well beaten yolk of one egg, add four tablespoonfuls of hot cream, and enough sugar to sweeten. Add hot coffee and fold in the beaten white of the egg. Serve immediately.
Malted Milk and Coffee No. 1 Mix to a smooth paste two tablespoonfuls of malted milk with two tablespoonfuls of coffee syrup. Put into a shaker, and add eight tablespoonfuls of milk. Shake well, strain into a glass, and fill up with ice-cold milk.
Malted Milk and Coffee No. 2 Put two tablespoonfuls of malted milk into a shaker with eight tablespoonfuls of rich milk, or cream. Add about a tablespoonful of coffee syrup and a teaspoonful of grape juice. Shake well, and strain into a glass one fourth full of chopped ice.
Three soda-fountain drinks from a temperance-era service book. The malted milks are straightforward; the coffee soufflé is the problem, because its egg is never brought anywhere near a safe temperature.
- Why the soufflé failsFour tablespoons of hot cream plus a splash of hot coffee, poured into a beaten yolk and then slackened with raw beaten white, will not carry the mixture to 160F and hold it there. This is a raw-egg drink served immediately, with Salmonella risk in both yolk and white, and the beaten white is folded in after any heat is already spent. If you want a warm coffee-and-egg drink, use a current recipe built on a cooked custard base or pasteurised eggs.
- It is not a souffléNothing is baked and nothing sets. The name appears to refer to the froth of the beaten white on top of a hot cup; "soufflé" was at times applied to drinks finished with whipped egg white.
- Coffee syrupA fountain staple, not brewed coffee: strong coffee reduced with an equal weight or more of sugar to a pourable syrup. Bottled coffee syrup is still sold in Rhode Island, where it never went out of fashion; strong cold-brew concentrate sweetened to taste is the nearest common substitute.
- Malted milkThe dried powder of malted barley, wheat flour and milk, a commercial product sold in tins and still sold today under the same name. Plain malted milk powder is what is wanted, not a chocolate malt mix, which will throw the balance of both drinks.
- Making the paste firstThe instruction to work the powder to a smooth paste with the syrup before any milk goes in is the hinge of No. 1. Malted milk powder lumps badly if it meets a large volume of cold liquid at once, and a shaker will not break the lumps up.
- Shaker measuresEight tablespoonfuls is half a cup. No. 1 is then filled up with cold milk, so the finished volume depends on the size of the glass. Each recipe makes one drink.
- Chopped iceA glass a quarter full of chopped ice means coarsely cracked, not crushed to slush. Crushed ice melts fast enough to thin the drink noticeably before it reaches the table.
- The grape juiceA teaspoonful is likely there for colour and acidity as much as flavour, lifting what would otherwise be a flat, sweet malt. Use unsweetened Concord grape juice; modern sweetened blends will push the drink over.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a genre that flourished between the rise of the temperance movement and national Prohibition: manuals of non-alcoholic drinks, some written for druggists and hotel men, others for readers mixing drinks at home. The soda fountain, which grew up inside the American drugstore, supplied the technique and much of the vocabulary — syrups, shakers, chopped ice, malted milk. Malted milk itself was a late-nineteenth-century commercial product, marketed first as an invalid and infant food before fountains discovered it made a milkshake taste better. The frothed-egg coffee is older stock, a cousin of the eggnogs and flips, minus the spirits.