Home › Egg Drinks › Hot Malted Milk and Ginger
Hot Malted Milk and Ginger
Mix to a smooth paste one tablespoonful of malted milk with a little cream. Add two tablespoonfuls of ginger syrup, and fill up with hot water.
A soda-fountain drink built the way fountain men built them: paste first, liquid after. Three ingredients, and the only thing that can go wrong is lumps.
- The hinge: make a true pasteMalted milk powder seizes into gritty lumps if hot liquid hits it dry. Work the tablespoonful with a teaspoon or two of cream until it is smooth and glossy before anything else goes in.
- Malted milkThis is the sweetened malted-barley-and-milk powder sold as Horlicks or as plain malted milk powder, not malt extract, malt syrup, or barley malt flour. Diastatic malt powder from a baking shelf will not work here.
- Ginger syrupFountain ginger syrup was a sweet ginger-flavoured sugar syrup. The syrup drained from a jar of stem ginger in syrup is the closest ready substitute; ginger cordial or a homemade syrup of equal sugar and water simmered with sliced fresh ginger also serves. Two tablespoonfuls is assertively sweet, so taste and scale back if your syrup is dense.
- "Fill up"The recipe names no vessel. A tumbler or mug of roughly 8 fluid ounces would take something like 6 oz of hot water after the paste and syrup, but that is a guess; fill whatever glass you are using. One serving.
- Water temperatureThe recipe says only hot water. Draw it just off the boil rather than at a hard boil.
- CreamThe cream meant here was most likely an everyday table cream rather than heavy whipping cream, so half-and-half or single cream is the nearer match. A little whole milk does the job if that is what is open.
- Why it sits under "Egg Drinks"No egg -- Despite any heading it sits under, this drink contains no egg. If you want the eggnog character of its neighbours, that is a different recipe.
The soda fountain was the institution that made drinks like this possible, and malted milk was one of its workhorses. The powder is generally credited to the Horlick brothers, English-born chemists working in Racine, Wisconsin, in the late nineteenth century, who marketed it first as an infant and invalid food; fountains were commonly attached to drugstores, where the powder was already on the shelf, and it found its way into drinks from there. Ginger syrup carries a warming bite, which may be part of why it recurs in books of counter drinks meant to be ordered by name.