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Malted Milk with Egg
Two teaspoonfuls malted milk, 1 egg, 2 teaspoonfuls whipped cream. Dissolve the malted milk in 1 ounce of hot water in shaker, add egg and whipped cream, shake thoroughly, add sufficient hot water, constantly stirring, and pour into 9-ounce hot soda mug. Sprinkle top with American Regal Ground Spices and serve.
This is a hot fountain egg drink, and the egg is the problem: it is stirred into hot water and served, never cooked. The rest of the notes are for reading the recipe, not for reproducing it.
- The egg is never cookedHot tap-temperature or even near-boiling water poured into a shaker and stirred does not hold a whole egg at a pasteurizing temperature for any meaningful time; the mixture is diluted and cooled instantly by the egg, cream and malt powder. Salmonella in shell eggs is the specific risk, and nothing in this procedure addresses it. If you want a hot malted egg drink, use a current recipe built on pasteurized shell eggs or pasteurized liquid egg.
- Why the fountain got away with itRaw-egg drinks were a routine part of the fountain trade, and the egg supply of the period was differently organised from today's. That is context, not a safety margin: modern shell eggs are still implicated in Salmonella outbreaks, and raw preparations remain a recognised route.
- Malted milkThe powder is an extract of malted barley and wheat flour dried with whole milk, sold in tins by Horlick's and its competitors. A comparable product is still sold today, though formulations have changed.
- "American Regal Ground Spices"Evidently a proprietary branded ground-spice blend sold to the fountain trade. Its actual composition is not given here; nutmeg was the usual dusting for a hot egg drink, and any spice mixture is a reasonable stand-in.
- The 9-ounce hot soda mugThe recipe specifies a hot mug, so the vessel was pre-warmed to keep the drink from chilling before service. The 1-ounce start of hot water is just enough to slake the malt powder into a smooth paste before the rest goes in.
- YieldOne mug, roughly a cup and a bit.
The hot soda fountain trade was a deliberate answer to the seasonal problem of the business: ice cream and phosphates sold in July and nothing sold in January, so fountain manuals of the 1900s and 1910s filled whole chapters with hot malted milks, beef teas, clam bouillons and egg drinks served in heavy warmed mugs. Malted milk itself was marketed first as an invalid and infant food, easily digested and fortifying, which is why these drinks read like tonics rather than treats. The named commercial spice blend is a reminder of who these books were for: they were trade manuals, teaching a soda clerk to work quickly with the branded tins already on his back bar.