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Malted Milk, Hot
Two tablespoonful malted milk, hot water enough to fill mug. While adding the water, stir the mixture with a spoon so as to make it smooth. Season with salt and pepper and serve with soda crackers. Some dispensers add a couple of teaspoonfuls of cream.
A savoury drink, not a sweet one: this is malted milk served like a cup of bouillon, seasoned and eaten with crackers. The main hurdle today is that the powder in most supermarkets is not the same product the dispenser reached for.
- The powderFountain malted milk was plain: dried whole milk with malted barley and wheat extract, unsweetened. Many jars sold now as "malted milk powder" have added sugar, and one seasoned with salt and pepper will taste wrong. Look for unsweetened malted milk powder, the kind sold for drinks and baking without sugar in the ingredient list.
- Water temperatureHot; it need not be at a rolling boil. Very hot water can give the milk solids a slightly cooked flavour, and water just off the boil dissolves the powder cleanly.
- Making it smoothStart with a splash of the hot water and work the powder into a paste against the side of the mug, then thin it out with the rest. Dumping in all the water at once leaves lumps that no amount of stirring will fully break up.
- Mug sizeThe recipe fixes only the powder, not the water: fill whatever mug you use. Two tablespoons of powder to about 8 ounces of water gives a thin, broth-like drink; increase to three if you want something with more body.
- The seasoningSalt and pepper are what make this the savoury version rather than the soda-fountain sweet. Go light on the salt first, since some powders already carry a fair amount.
- The creamTwo teaspoonfuls of cream is a small addition with a real effect: it rounds off the slightly grainy, cereal edge of the malt. Half-and-half or whole milk works the same way.
- YieldOne mug, one serving. Soda crackers on the side are part of the dish rather than a garnish, and the drink is thin enough to want them.
Malted milk began as an infant and invalid food rather than a soda-fountain treat: a shelf-stable powder of dried milk and malted grain extract, promoted in the late nineteenth century as nourishment for the sick, the elderly and travellers. American drugstore fountains, which sat under the same roof as the pharmacy counter, took it up on exactly those grounds, and a hot malted milk was sold in cold weather as a restorative rather than a dessert. That is why this version is seasoned with salt and pepper and served with soda crackers, which puts it closer to a cup of beef tea or bouillon than to the thick, sweet, ice-cream-based malteds the same fountains would become famous for a generation later. Fountain manuals of the period seem to have listed both, and to have noted, as this one does, that individual dispensers had their own habits about the cream.