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Coffee Malt
One and one-half ounces coffee syrup, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful malted milk, 11/ ½ ounces plain cream, ¼ glass ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve. If your fountain is small, serve the well-known popular flavors. Do not attempt to introduce new drinks.
This is a fountain formula built on a whole raw egg that is never heated at any stage, which is why it cannot be recommended today.
- The raw egg is the problemA whole shell egg goes into the shaker cold and is served cold, so nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would inactivate Salmonella. Shaking with ice chills the mixture further rather than heating it.
- Cream compounds itThe one and a half ounces of plain cream may well have been unpasteurized, since pasteurization was far from universal in the fountain era. Any drink of this type should be made from a current recipe using pasteurized ingredients.
- Malted milk is unchangedMalted milk powder is one of the few ingredients here still sold in essentially its original form: dried milk with malted barley and wheat. A teaspoonful is a very light hand by modern malt-shop standards.
- Coffee syrupFountain coffee syrup was a sweetened coffee concentrate, roughly a strong coffee extract cut with simple syrup, not the coffee-flavored dessert syrups sold now. Bottled coffee syrup of the New England type is the closest surviving relative.
- The measurementsOunces at the fountain are fluid ounces poured from a graduated measure or syrup pump. "11/ ½ ounces" is a typesetting slip for 1½ ounces, matching the syrup. "¼ glass ice" means ice filling a quarter of the serving glass, whose size the recipe does not state.
- "Shake, strain, toss"Toss means pouring the strained drink back and forth between two vessels to aerate and foam it, a standard fountain move for egg drinks. It is the step that gave these things their body.
Egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain from the 1880s through Prohibition, when the fountain took over much of the saloon's business and its repertoire: egg phosphates, egg lemonades, and malteds were sold as nourishment as much as refreshment, on the widely held view that a raw egg beaten into milk was a tonic for the thin and the convalescent. Malted milk powder, patented in the 1880s and marketed first as an infant and invalid food, moved behind the counter for the same reason, and the fountain "malt" is a direct descendant of that medicinal framing. The closing advice here is trade counsel rather than cookery: the dispenser is told to stick to the popular flavors if his fountain is small, and not to attempt new drinks — advice for soda men rather than home cooks.