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Hot Milk Shake
Hot milk shakes are made by shaking 1 ounce (any flavored syrup desired by the customer) with hot milk, using plenty of soda foam from the squirt bottle.
A one-line fountain formula that assumes a soda dispenser at your elbow. The substitutions are simple, but the proportions and the mechanics of shaking something hot need spelling out.
- The measureOne ounce of syrup is 2 tablespoons. Fountain flavoring syrups of the period were dense sugar syrups, heavier than most modern bottled syrups, so a bought coffee syrup or a homemade simple syrup infused with vanilla, chocolate or fruit is the right register. Modern thin pancake-style syrups will taste weak at this dose.
- No ice creamDespite the name, a "shake" at the fountain meant a drink shaken in a tin, not a frozen one. Nothing here is frozen, and adding ice cream defeats the point of a hot beverage.
- Milk temperatureScald the milk to about 160-170F, not boiling. Boiled milk develops a cooked, sulfurous note and a skin that will clog the shaker; hot-but-not-simmering keeps it sweet.
- Shaking hot liquidA sealed shaker full of hot milk and carbonated water builds pressure fast and can blow the lid. Shake in an open tin with a hand over the top, or whisk vigorously in a pitcher, or use a milk frother. This is the one instruction to translate rather than follow literally.
- The squirt bottleThe "soda foam" is plain carbonated water from a siphon or seltzer bottle. The original asks for plenty of it, but carbonated water is acidic and may curdle hot milk, so add it last and sparingly; its job is head and lift.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no milk measure. Six to eight ounces of hot milk per ounce of syrup produces one fountain glass, which is a single serving.
- Serving vesselHot fountain drinks were generally served in a heavy mug or a metal-holdered glass. A thin cold glass risks cracking and will kill the foam; warm the vessel first.
Soda fountains were a summer business, and the trade press of the early twentieth century pushed hot dispensing hard as a way to keep the marble counter earning through winter — hot chocolate, hot malted milk, beef tea, hot lemonade and hot versions of the shaken milk drinks the same clerk made cold in July. The word "shake" here still carries its literal, mechanical sense, from the shaker tin the clerk worked by hand or on a spindle mixer; its narrowing to mean a thick frozen drink came later, with the spread of ice cream in the mixture. Whether the squirt of carbonated water into hot milk was a matter of fountain habit is harder to say, though foam was certainly the house style.