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Hot Milk
This is considered a good stimulant after much fatigue. It should not be allowed to boil, but should just reach that point and be served as hot as possible the cup being heated before being used, and the milk being covered with the inverted saucer while on its way to the sick-room. The patient should sip the milk as hot as can be borne.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but the technique is specific and the details are the whole point: temperature, speed, and a heated cup.
- "Just reach that point"Scalding is around 180-185F, when steam rises and small bubbles ring the edge of the pan. Boiled milk tastes flat and cooked, which is why the instruction is emphatic; pull it off the heat the moment the surface trembles.
- Use a heavy pan and stirMilk proteins and lactose scorch onto a thin pan base fast, and the burnt taste carries through the whole cup. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-low heat, stirred, or a microwave in 30-second bursts, both work.
- The skinHeld near the boil, milk forms a skin of coagulated protein and fat within a minute or two. Stirring or covering the pan slows it; skim it off before pouring if it forms.
- Warming the cupNot fussiness. A cold china cup pulls a startling amount of heat out of a cupful of milk. Fill it with boiling water, let it stand a minute, tip it out, then pour.
- The inverted saucerPeriod kitchens were often a long walk from the sickroom. A saucer over the cup is still the simplest way to keep a drink hot in transit, and it keeps the skin from setting hard.
- Milk itself has changedThis was written for whole milk, likely unhomogenized and often raw. Modern pasteurized whole milk behaves much the same on the stove; skim gives a thinner drink and is often said to catch on the pan more easily.
- YieldOne cup, one person. Scale by the cupful rather than heating a large pan, since milk held hot develops the cooked flavor the recipe is trying to avoid.
Sections of "foods for invalids" were standard in general household cookbooks well into the twentieth century, when nursing the sick was domestic work rather than hospital work, and the kitchen was expected to supply the sickroom. Milk was the backbone of that diet: it was regarded as nearly complete nourishment, it required no chewing, and it could be got down a patient with little appetite. Heating it served several purposes at once, some of them better founded than others. Hot liquid was thought to be more readily digested and less likely to chill a weak patient, and warmth was widely held to be restorative after exertion; scalding also, though the book does not say so, killed a good deal of what raw milk of the period might carry. The insistence on a heated cup, a covering saucer and sipping the milk "as hot as can be borne" reflects a household in which the cook and the patient were in different rooms and the temperature of the delivered cup was a matter of some pride.