The milkshake started as a whiskey drink. The earliest known recipe, recorded in 1885, called for cream, eggs, and whiskey, making it closer to a boozy eggnog than anything you’d find at a drive-through today. The thick, sweet, ice-cream-based drink we recognize now took shape over several decades, shaped by changing tastes, new technology, and the rise of American fast food.
The Original Milkshake Was Alcoholic
The term “milkshake” first appeared in print around 1855, describing an eggnog-style alcoholic drink. The oldest known recipe, from 1885, combined cream, eggs, and whiskey into something rich and punchy, with the dark spirit front and center. It was an adult beverage, served in a world where soda fountains hadn’t yet taken over.
That changed fast. Just one year later, in 1886, the Atlanta Constitution published a recipe titled “Milk Shake” that called for milk, sugar, and flavored syrup, shaken vigorously over crushed ice in a tin can. No whiskey. This non-alcoholic version looked remarkably like what we’d recognize today, minus one key ingredient: ice cream hadn’t entered the picture yet. Through the rest of the 19th century, a milkshake was exactly what the name described. Flavored milk, shaken up.
How Ice Cream Got Into the Glass
The milkshake transformed between 1911 and 1922, when electric mixers and blenders replaced hand shaking. Once a motor could do the mixing, soda fountain workers could blend ice cream into the drink and get a smooth, thick result that hand shaking couldn’t achieve. The ice cream milkshake was born out of this new technology as much as any single recipe.
The pivotal moment came in 1922 at a Walgreens pharmacy in Chicago. A soda fountain worker named Ivar “Pop” Coulson dropped two scoops of vanilla ice cream into a glass of milk, added chocolate syrup, and then stirred in something that hadn’t been used this way before: malted milk powder. Horlick’s brand malted milk powder already existed for plain malted milk drinks, but Coulson was the first to blend it with ice cream. The result was the malted milkshake, and it became a sensation. Walgreens didn’t invent the milkshake, but it did invent the malt.
Around this same period, Stephen Poplawski was developing what would become the electric blender. He wanted a better way to mix malts and milkshakes at soda fountains, so he put a spinning blade at the bottom of a container and connected it to a motor. He received patents for his blender design in 1932, and the technology spread quickly through restaurants and drugstores.
Soda Fountains and 1950s Culture
Soda fountain counters, often housed inside local drugstores, had been gathering spots since the Prohibition era, when they offered one of the few legal places to socialize over a drink. By the 1950s, these counters had become the backdrop for American youth culture. Milkshakes, served in tall glasses with whipped cream, were the centerpiece of date nights and after-school hangouts. The image of two people sharing a milkshake with two straws became an icon of the era.
McDonald’s and the Milkshake Machine
The milkshake played a surprisingly direct role in the creation of modern fast food. In the 1950s, a salesman named Ray Kroc was selling Multimixer milkshake machines to restaurants and soda fountains. In 1954, he received an unusually large order from a small restaurant in California run by the McDonald brothers. Curious about why a single burger stand needed so many milkshake machines, Kroc traveled west to see the operation for himself.
What he found was a restaurant built around speed and consistency, cranking out burgers, fries, and milkshakes at a pace he’d never seen. Kroc convinced the brothers to franchise, and he built a system obsessed with standardization. Every McDonald’s milkshake would taste the same whether you ordered it in Illinois or Texas. He even founded “Hamburger University” in 1961 to train franchisees on maintaining that consistency. The milkshake machine that brought Kroc to McDonald’s helped launch the fast food industry as we know it.
Milkshake, Malt, Frappe, or Cabinet
What you call this drink depends on where you live, and in some regions, ordering the wrong word gets you the wrong drink entirely.
- Milkshake: In most of the United States, this means ice cream blended with milk, usually with syrup or other flavorings. In New England, though, a milkshake is just milk and flavored syrup, no ice cream involved. Order a “chocolate milkshake” in Boston and you’ll get chocolate milk.
- Frappe: Pronounced “frap” in New England, this is what the rest of the country calls a milkshake: ice cream, milk, and syrup blended together. Outside New England, “frappe” often refers to iced coffee drinks, popularized by chains like Starbucks.
- Cabinet: In Rhode Island and parts of southeastern Massachusetts, the ice-cream-blended drink is called a cabinet, named after the kitchen cabinet where the blender was stored. Coffee-flavored cabinets made with Autocrat Coffee Syrup are the regional classic.
- Malt: A milkshake with malted milk powder added. That powder is a blend of malted barley, wheat flour, and evaporated milk, giving the drink a richer, toasty, slightly nutty flavor. It’s the oldest ice cream milkshake variant, dating back to Coulson’s 1922 recipe.
The Freakshake and Modern Milkshakes
The milkshake’s most recent reinvention came from Canberra, Australia. In 2016, a family-run cafe called Pâtissez, operated by Anna Petridis and her parents Gina and Phil, created the FreakShake: an over-the-top milkshake topped with whole slices of cake, doughnuts, candy bars, dripping sauces, and whipped cream piled high above the glass. Photos spread across social media, and within months, cafes worldwide were building their own towering versions.
These extreme milkshakes represent the latest chapter in a drink that started as whiskey and eggs, became flavored milk shaken over ice, gained ice cream through electric blending, fueled the rise of fast food, and now serves as edible social media content. The core, though, hasn’t changed much since 1922: ice cream, milk, and something sweet, spun together until smooth.