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Malted Milk and Oyster
Mix to a smooth paste one teaspoonful of malted milk with a little milk. Then add three tablespoonfuls of oyster juice and fill up the glass with hot milk. Season with salt and celery salt.
A soda-fountain "nourishing" drink of the Prohibition era, built the way a fountain man built everything: paste first, liquid after. The problem is not the technique but the oyster juice, which in this formula is never heated to a safe temperature.
- Raw oyster liquor is the failure pointThe recipe does not say where the three tablespoonfuls of oyster juice come from or that they are heated, and nothing in the method cooks them. Raw oyster liquor is a recognised vehicle for Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Vibrio vulnificus and norovirus, and it concentrates whatever the oyster filtered.
- Hot milk does not pasteurise anythingHot milk poured into a room-temperature glass already holding paste and unheated oyster juice is diluted and cooled on contact, and the drink is consumed immediately rather than held. That is not a kill step. If you want a hot oyster drink, use a current recipe for oyster stew, where the liquor is actually simmered.
- Malted milkA dried powder of malted barley, wheat flour and whole milk; Horlick's was the familiar tin behind the counter. Modern malted milk powder is broadly the same sort of product, though some supermarket versions are sweetened and cocoa-flavoured, which is not what this savoury drink assumes.
- The paste step is not optionalMalted milk powder seizes into lumps if hot liquid hits it dry. Slaking it with a little cold milk to a smooth paste before the hot milk goes in is the whole reason the instruction leads with it.
- Celery saltA blend of ground celery seed and salt, commercially available by the late nineteenth century. Here it supplies savoury lift without heat.
- Glass sizeThe recipe does not state a glass size; "fill up the glass" simply means topping off whatever tumbler is used, after the paste and oyster juice are in. One serving.
Books like this one appeared in quantity once Prohibition turned every saloon into a potential soda fountain and the trade needed a repertoire of drinks that were substantial enough to sell at a counter where nobody could order a beer. Malted milk was the workhorse of that repertoire: a shelf-stable powder of malted grain and dried milk, developed as an infant and invalid food in the 1880s and generally credited to the Horlick brothers, which by 1900 was doing double duty as a fountain beverage sold on its "nourishing" reputation. The oyster juice belongs to a parallel American fashion — oyster cocktails, oyster broths and clam bouillon were standard savoury fountain items, poured for people who wanted something restorative rather than sweet, and hot clam or oyster beverages held their place on fountain lists well into the 1920s. This drink sits at the intersection: a dose of malted milk sold as strength, seasoned into something savoury.