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Hot Malted Milk Chocolate
Mix one teaspoonful of malted milk with two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream and one tablespoonful of chocolate paste. When smooth add hot water to fill cup and put a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
A soda-fountain drink rather than a kitchen one: everything here assumes a counter stocked with prepared syrups and a spigot of hot water. Two of the three ingredients need translating before you can build it.
- Chocolate pasteNot a modern spread or ganache. Fountain chocolate paste was cocoa powder cooked with sugar and a little water to a thick, glossy syrup. A heaping tablespoon of good chocolate syrup, or two teaspoons cocoa mashed with two teaspoons sugar and a splash of hot water, stands in for it.
- Malted milkPlain malted milk powder — malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk — best known at the time under the Horlick's name and meant to be reconstituted with liquid. Modern plain malted milk powder is the nearest thing, though most versions now carry added sugar; chocolate-flavoured versions are a different product and will make the drink cloyingly sweet.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, as opposed to the sour cream and buttermilk also on hand in a period kitchen. Ordinary heavy or whipping cream is right.
- The hinge is the pasteMalted milk powder lumps stubbornly in hot liquid. The cold cream-and-paste slurry exists solely to hydrate it smoothly; work it to a glossy, grit-free paste against the side of the cup before any hot water goes in.
- Hot water, not boilingHot water -- The recipe specifies no temperature. Very hot water rather than a hard rolling boil suits a drink built on cream.
- YieldOne cup, the size of which the recipe leaves to the cup you use. Scale straight up for more.
- ToppingThe recipe does not say whether the whipped cream is sweetened; the paste already carries the sugar.
This is a soda-fountain formula of the kind gathered in the dispensers' trade manuals. Malted milk had been developed in the 1880s in Racine, Wisconsin, as an infant and invalid food, and it moved to the fountain because it was nourishing, shelf-stable and dissolved into almost anything; the malted milkshake grew out of the same counter practice. Hot drinks like this one gave the fountain something to sell in winter, and the recipe's structure — a measured syrup, a measured powder, cream, and hot water to fill — is written for a dispenser working fast rather than for a cook at a stove.