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Hot Malted Milk and Orange
Mix two teaspoonfuls of malted milk with two tablespoonfuls of rich cream to a smooth paste. Add one tablespoonful of orange syrup and fill up the glass with hot milk. Put a spoonful of whipped cream on top with a little nutmeg.
A soda-fountain drink built in the glass, and the technique matters more than the quantities: malted milk powder clumps instantly in hot liquid unless it is slaked first.
- The hinge: make the pasteWork the malted milk powder into the cold cream until it is completely smooth before any hot milk goes in. Powder dropped straight into hot milk seizes into lumps that will not whisk out.
- Malted milkThis means plain malted milk powder — malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk, sold as Horlick's and its imitators. The modern chocolate-flavoured malt drink mixes are a different product and will overwhelm the orange.
- Orange syrupA fountain syrup, not marmalade or juice. Any orange soda syrup or a homemade sugar syrup infused with orange zest and juice works; if you use juice alone, allow for the lost sweetness.
- Hot, not boilingHeat the milk until it steams but stops short of a boil. Boiled milk skins over and takes on a cooked flavour that fights the malt, and very hot milk will thin the whipped cream on top the moment it lands.
- CurdlingOrange syrup is acidic and milk near boiling can break. Keep the milk below a simmer and add it to the paste rather than the other way round.
- The glassUse a tempered mug or heatproof glass, and warm it first.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the cream. Pre-ground nutmeg has largely gone flat and contributes little but colour.
- YieldOne drink, roughly 8 to 10 ounces depending on the glass.
The book belongs to the flood of non-alcoholic drink manuals published as American temperance sentiment hardened toward national Prohibition. Malted milk was the natural backbone of such a collection: patented in the 1880s in Racine, Wisconsin by the Horlick brothers as an infant and invalid food, it had by the 1910s become a soda-fountain staple, valued for body and a faintly toasted sweetness that gave a milk drink some substance. Hot versions like this one were sold through the winter, when the fountain's iced trade fell away, and the whipped cream and grated nutmeg recall the older tradition of hot spiced milk punches and possets ataken out.