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Hot Egg Malted Milk
Into a mixing glass break 1 egg, add 2 ounces of plain cream, 3 teaspoonfuls of malted milk; shake well, fill the glass with hot water, top with whipped cream and serve with salt, or sweeten with vanilla syrup, if desired.
A soda-fountain egg drink from the era when the pharmacy counter sold eggs in a glass as a restorative. The method leaves the egg raw, which is the problem.
- The egg is never cookedThe egg may not reach a safe temperature -- Hot water poured over a raw egg, two ounces of cream and three teaspoons of malted milk powder will not reliably bring the mixture to a temperature that inactivates Salmonella, and the drink is served immediately rather than held.
- Why it mattered less in 1900Modern risk -- Egg-borne Salmonella can be present inside the intact shell egg itself, so freshness and cleanliness do not remove it.
- If you want to drink something like thisUse a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base. We are not offering timings or temperatures for this version.
- Malted milkThe powder here is the plain, unsweetened malted milk of the period — malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk — not the sweetened chocolate malt drink mix sold under similar names now.
- Plain cream"Plain" most likely distinguishes it from the sweetened and flavored creams kept in fountain dispensers. It corresponds roughly to what would now be sold as light cream.
- Salt or sweetServing "with salt" appears to mean salt offered alongside, as with a plain egg drink; the vanilla syrup is given as the sweet alternative. Two ounces of cream and a full glass of hot water makes a single tall serving.
Hot egg drinks were a staple of the American soda fountain in the decades when the fountain was still an arm of the drugstore, and the counter sold health as often as pleasure. Malted milk powder, marketed from the 1880s as an easily digested food for infants and invalids, moved quickly onto the fountain menu, where it was combined with eggs, cream and hot water into something between a beverage and a prescription. Drinks of this type — egg phosphates, egg lemonades, hot egg malteds — were recommended for the run-down, the convalescent and the person who had missed a meal, and this one offers salt or syrup as equal alternatives. The genre faded as fountains detached from pharmacies and as public health advice about raw eggs hardened through the twentieth century.