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Hot Malted Milk
Mix two tablespoonfuls of malted milk with an equal amount of milk to a smooth paste. Add hot water or milk, stirring all the time, and season with salt, a little white pepper, or celery salt. Serve with soda crackers.
A savory hot drink built on malted milk powder, closer to a thin broth than to the sweet soda-fountain malt most people picture. A few notes on the ingredient and the mixing.
- What malted milk isA powder of malted barley and wheat extract dried with milk; Horlick's was the best-known brand. Modern supermarket malted milk powder is usually sweetened, and some versions are chocolate-flavoured; look for a plain, unsweetened version, or the salt and pepper here will fight the sugar.
- The paste comes firstThe hinge of the recipe. Two tablespoons of powder worked to a smooth paste with an equal amount of cold or lukewarm milk will disperse; powder dropped straight into hot liquid tends to seize into lumps that are hard to break up.
- Liquid quantityThe original gives none. Roughly 1 cup of hot water or milk to the two tablespoons of powder makes one mug of drinking consistency; use less for something closer to a thick gruel, which is what invalid cookery of the period often wanted.
- Do not boilAdd the hot liquid off the heat and stir continuously. Boiling can leave the mixture grainy, and milk scorches on the bottom of the pan.
- SeasoningSalt, white pepper and celery salt are all assertive against a sweetish malt base. Start with a pinch of each and taste, since celery salt supplies salt of its own.
- Soda crackersPeriod soda crackers were plain, hard and barely salted, nearest to a modern saltine or water biscuit.
- YieldOne serving, as written. It is best mixed to order, since the powder will settle and a skin can form on standing.
The salt and pepper are the striking thing here. Malted milk powder had been on the market since the early 1880s, developed by the Horlick brothers, William and James, in Racine, Wisconsin, and was promoted first as infant and invalid food, then as portable nourishment for travelers, explorers and soldiers, before drugstore fountains made it a sweet drink. The savory treatment here, seasoned like a consommé and served with crackers to soak, belongs to the older use: food for someone who needed feeding, not a treat.