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Hot Malted Milk Eggnogg
Mix two tablespoonfuls of malted milk with a little hot water to a smooth paste. Beat one egg until light and add to the malted milk, and fill up the glass with hot water or milk. Flavor with vanilla or chocolate.
A soda-fountain formula from the era when the drugstore counter competed with the saloon. The method is simple, but the egg is the problem: nothing in this drink ever reaches a temperature that would make a raw shell egg safe.
- Why the egg failsA beaten raw egg stirred into a glass of hot water or milk is never held at a temperature and time that would reduce Salmonella: the liquid drops as soon as it meets the cold egg and the malted milk paste, and the drink is served immediately rather than cooked.
- The dilution problemOne egg against a full tumbler of liquid means the egg is a minor component by volume, so it cannot be relied on to thicken or set — there is no visual cue at all that heat has done anything to it. The drink looks identical whether the egg was pasteurized or not.
- If you want the drinkUse a current recipe built around pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base. We are not supplying a revised procedure here.
- Malted milk, then and nowThe malted milk of this period was a plain powder of malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk, meant to be reconstituted as a food. Modern supermarket malt powders are usually sweetened and often contain cocoa, so two tablespoonfuls will read much sweeter than intended.
- The paste step is realWhatever else, the instruction to work the powder to a smooth paste with a little hot water first is sound technique. Malted milk powder clumps instantly if the full volume of hot liquid goes in at once.
- Glass size"Fill up the glass" means a single tumbler, and the recipe makes one serving. The book gives no capacity.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to a small genre of books published while the temperance movement was gathering toward national prohibition: collections of soft drinks, fruit syrups, phosphates and egg drinks meant to stand against the bar. Egg drinks belonged in such collections because a beaten egg in milk was understood as nourishment rather than indulgence, and egg lemonade appeared on invalid-cookery lists throughout the nineteenth century. Malted milk was the modern ingredient of the moment, a soluble powder of malted grain and dried milk generally traced to the Horlick brothers in Racine, Wisconsin, in the early 1880s, first sold as an infant and invalid food and then adopted wholesale by fountain clerks, who found it made milk drinks taste richer than they were. The combination here — malt for body, egg for substance, vanilla or chocolate for flavor — anticipates the malted milkshake, minus the ice cream and minus any awareness that the raw egg carried a risk.