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Malted Milk and Orange
Into a shaker put one tablespoonful of malted milk, break in one or two eggs, and add eight tablespoonfuls of rich milk and a teaspoonful of orange syrup. Shake thoroughly and strain into a glass and fill with Vichy.
This is a soda-fountain egg drink, and the eggs are never heated at any point — the whole thing is shaken cold and topped with sparkling water. The notes below explain the terms and why the drink fails modern food-safety practice.
- Why it cannot be made as writtenOne or two raw shell eggs are shaken into cold milk and served immediately, with nothing in the process that reaches a temperature capable of killing Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside intact, clean-looking eggs. There is also no acid, alcohol or heat step to reduce the risk. If you want a malted egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or a commercial pasteurised egg product.
- The milk of the period"Rich milk" here presumably meant whole rather than skimmed milk; in books of this date it may well have been unpasteurised, since compulsory pasteurisation was not yet universal in the United States. If so, that compounds the raw-egg problem: neither of the two main ingredients would have been heat-treated.
- Malted milkA powder of malted barley, wheat flour and dried or evaporated milk, sold from the 1880s onward and still on shelves as a drink mix.
- VichyBottled alkaline mineral water from Vichy in France, or a domestic imitation of it, dispensed at the fountain. Its mineral, faintly saline character differs from plain sparkling water, though the recipe says nothing about why it was specified.
- Orange syrupA fountain sugar syrup flavoured with orange, closer to a sweet cordial than to juice.
- Eight tablespoonfulsHalf a cup, or 120 ml — a small glass by modern standards, since the Vichy was meant to make up most of the volume.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the non-alcoholic drinks literature that appeared as American drinking habits came under temperance and Prohibition pressure, and its title puns on "being on the water wagon," the period phrase for abstaining. Malted milk was central to that trade: it was marketed first as an invalid and infant food and only later as a fountain treat, which is part of why so many of these formulas read like tonics, with eggs shaken in for nourishment as much as flavour. Egg drinks — egg phosphates, egg lemonades, egg malteds — were a standard fountain category well into the twentieth century. Their disappearance from menus is usually attributed to changes in commercial egg handling and public-health expectations about the raw shell egg, alongside shifting tastes.