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Hot Malted Milk Punch
I. One ounce French brandy, 1 teaspoonful malted milk, I cut loaf sugar, hot milk to fill 8-ounce mug, finish with whipped cream and grated nutmeg. Serve 3 wafers. 2. One ounce malted milk, 1 dram coffee extract, 1 ounce cream. Reduce the lumps with a spoon. Stir briskly while adding hot soda.
Two fountain drinks under one heading: a brandy-laced hot malted milk, and a hot mocha malted with no spirits at all. Both live or die on the same step, which is getting the malt powder dissolved before the hot liquid goes in.
- Kill the lumps firstMalted milk powder seizes into pellets the moment hot liquid hits it dry. Work the powder to a smooth paste with the cream (or a spoonful of cold milk) against the bottom of the mug, then add the hot liquid in a thin stream while stirring hard. The instruction to "reduce the lumps with a spoon" is the whole technique.
- Malted milkThis is plain malted milk powder — malted barley and wheat extract dried with milk, the Horlick's-type product — not the flavoured drinking chocolate sold under similar names. Unsweetened or lightly sweetened powder is closest to what a 1900s fountain kept in its canister.
- Cut loaf sugarA single cube cut from a sugar loaf, roughly a teaspoon. One cube in eight ounces is barely sweet by modern taste.
- A dramA fluid dram is one eighth of a fluid ounce, about three quarters of a teaspoon. Coffee extract meant a thick sweetened coffee syrup or concentrate kept at the fountain; strong cold-brew concentrate or a scant teaspoon of instant espresso dissolved in a little water stands in.
- "Hot soda"Not carbonated water. Winter fountains drew hot plain water from a heated urn tap, and that is what the second drink calls for. Carbonated water heated will simply foam over and go flat.
- TemperatureMilk for the first version wants to be steaming but not boiled; boiled milk will skin over in the mug.
- Mug sizeAn 8-ounce mug means the finished drink, so figure about six ounces of hot milk after the ounce of brandy, the powder and the space for whipped cream. Each formula makes one drink.
- The wafersThree thin crisp wafers served alongside were common fountain practice. Any thin crisp cookie does the job.
Malted milk began as an invalid and infant food — the malted barley-and-milk powder is generally credited to William Horlick, working in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1880s — and it was the soda fountain trade that turned it into a pleasure drink. Fountains had an obvious problem: ice cream and cold soda stop selling in January. The answer was "hot soda," a whole winter menu of hot beefy bouillons, hot chocolate, hot lemonade and hot malted milks drawn from a heated urn and served in a thick mug with wafers, which is why a book about soda carries a recipe with no soda in it. The brandy version here is a reminder that the drugstore fountain sat inside a pharmacy, where a measured ounce of spirits was still an ordinary thing to put in a warm drink for a customer who had come in out of the cold.