Home › Milk and Malted Milk › Malted Milk and Bouillon
Malted Milk and Bouillon
Mix to a smooth paste a teaspoonful of malted milk with a little milk. Add two tablespoonfuls of beef bouillon and two tablespoonfuls of plain tomato bouillon. Fill up the glass or mug with hot water. Stir well.
A hot savoury drink from the soda-fountain era, built in the glass rather than cooked. Everything depends on getting the powder smooth before any hot liquid touches it.
- Slake the powder firstMalted milk powder clumps instantly in hot liquid and the lumps never fully dissolve. Work the teaspoonful into a tablespoon or so of cold milk until it is a glossy paste with no dry specks, then build upward.
- What malted milk means herePlain malted milk powder — malted barley, wheat and dried whole milk, unsweetened, of the Horlick's type. Modern chocolate or sweetened malt drink mixes will make this drink taste wrong; look for unflavoured malted milk powder.'
- Beef bouillonAt the time this meant strong household beef broth or a dissolved bouillon capsule. Two tablespoonfuls is a concentrate, not a serving of soup, so use full-strength stock reduced a little or a cube dissolved in very little water rather than ready-to-drink broth.
- Plain tomato bouillonMost likely a lightly seasoned tomato broth: tomato juice or thin strained tomato with a little salt, unsweetened. Canned tomato juice, salted, is the nearest thing on a modern shelf; avoid cocktail mixes, which usually carry sugar and horseradish.
- Hot, not boilingFill up with water that is hot but short of a rolling boil. Boiling water poured onto milk solids and tomato acid can curdle the milk and leave a grainy skin on top.
- Yield and seasoningOne glass or mug, whatever size you use; the recipe gives no volume. Taste before serving, since bouillon strengths vary wildly, and adjust salt.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of American drink books published in the later 1910s, when temperance pressure and the drugstore soda fountain between them created a demand for grown-up drinks with no alcohol in them — hence the title's joke about riding on the water wagon. Malted milk was the modern ingredient of the moment: a shelf-stable powder of malted grain and dried milk sold from the 1880s as an invalid and infant food, and taken up by fountain clerks because it dissolved into anything. Hot bouillon was the fountain's cold-weather counterpart to the summer phosphate, and beef tea in particular carried a strong reputation as restorative and strengthening food for the unwell. This drink simply stacks the two ideas on top of each other, with tomato for acidity, and is best read as a nourishing hot cup for a raw afternoon rather than a cocktail substitute.