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Malted Milk Coffee
Prepare a syrup of 8 ounces of malted milk, 16 ounces sugar, 2½ ounces coffee extract, 24 ounces water. Dissolve malted milk and coffee in water. Strain, cool, add coffee extract and color with caramel.
This is a fountain syrup, not a drink: it makes a bulk concentrate to be drawn by the ounce and finished with milk, cream or carbonated water at the counter. The written method is slightly garbled, so read the sequence before you start.
- Fix the order of workThe ingredient list names coffee extract, but the method says to dissolve "malted milk and coffee" in water and then add the extract afterward. Dissolve the malted milk powder and the sugar in the water, strain, cool, then stir in the extract last so its aroma is not cooked or beaten out.
- Ounces, weight and fluidMalted milk and sugar are weight ounces and water is fluid ounces; the coffee extract is most likely fluid ounces too, though the original does not say. The caramel is given no measure at all. Eight ounces of malted milk powder is roughly two cups, 16 ounces of sugar is about 2¼ cups, and 24 fluid ounces is three cups.
- Malted milkThe period product is a powder of malted barley, wheat flour and dried milk — Horlick's and its imitators. Modern malted milk powder is the same idea; the chocolate-flavoured version sold beside it is not, and will fight the coffee.
- Coffee extractA dark, sweetened or unsweetened coffee essence sold to fountains by the gallon, far stronger than brewed coffee. Two and a half ounces of ordinary drip coffee will give you a pale, watery syrup; use a concentrate or an espresso reduction and expect to adjust.
- Caramel colourPurely cosmetic, to give the syrup the dark body the malted milk powder washes out. A teaspoon of commercial caramel colour or a spoonful of burnt-sugar syrup is enough; more will turn it bitter.
- Straining mattersMalted milk powder lumps and leaves grit that will clog a pump and settle in the bottom of a glass. Strain through fine mesh or muslin while the mixture is still warm, before the extract goes in.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1¼ quarts of syrup. Fountain practice was around 1 to 1½ ounces per glass, shaken or stirred with 6 to 8 ounces of cold milk, or drawn with soda water as a coffee malted soda.
- KeepingThis is a milk-solids syrup with no preservative beyond its sugar. Refrigerate it and use it within a week.
Malted milk began as an infant and invalid food — a shelf-stable powder of malted barley, wheat and dried milk, generally traced to the Horlick brothers in Racine, Wisconsin, in the early 1880s — and was absorbed by the American soda fountain, where its thickening body and faintly toasty sweetness turned thin milk drinks into something substantial. Fountain manuals of this era treat malted milk as a standard base to be flavoured in every direction: chocolate, vanilla, egg, fruit and, as here, coffee. The recipe's form is typical of the trade literature rather than the home cookbook, giving proportions in bulk by the ounce for a syrup jar rather than a single glass, and assuming a dispenser who knows how many ounces go into a shaker.