Milkshakes are called milkshakes because the original version was literally milk that was shaken. The first recorded use of the word appeared in print in 1885, but the drink it described was nothing like the thick, ice-cream-filled treat you’d order today. It was an alcoholic concoction made with milk, eggs, and whiskey or brandy, served as a health tonic.
The 1885 Original Was an Alcoholic Tonic
The earliest milkshake was closer to a boozy eggnog than a dessert. Made with milk, raw eggs, and whiskey, it was marketed as a “sturdy, healthful” drink meant to boost vitality and energy. This was an era when alcohol was still common in pharmacy-based treatments, so the idea of a fortifying milk-and-spirits blend wasn’t unusual. The name was straightforward: you took milk, you shook it with other ingredients, and you had a milkshake.
How Milk and Malt Replaced Whiskey
By the early 1900s, the drink had started to shed its alcoholic roots. A key ingredient in that shift was malted milk powder, originally developed by the Horlick brothers in Wisconsin as a nutritional supplement for infants and people recovering from illness. The powder, made from wheat and malted barley, was mixed into milk as a source of easy calories and nutrition. Soda fountain operators began adding it to their milk drinks for flavor and richness, and “malted milkshakes” became a staple of the American drugstore counter.
The real turning point came in 1922, when an employee at a Walgreens drugstore in Chicago reportedly added ice cream to a malted milk drink. That addition transformed the milkshake from a frothy flavored milk into the thick, cold, sweet beverage we recognize today. The ice cream version caught on fast, and by the mid-20th century it had essentially replaced the older recipes in the public imagination.
Mass Production Made It a Standard
The milkshake became a cultural fixture thanks in large part to the fast food boom. In 1939, a salesman named Ray Kroc became the exclusive distributor of the Multimixer, a machine that could blend multiple milkshakes at once. When he visited a small hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California, that was running several Multimixers simultaneously, he saw an opportunity. That stand belonged to Dick and Mac McDonald, who had perfected a limited menu of fifteen-cent hamburgers, fries, and what they called “Triple Thick Milkshakes.” Kroc eventually took over the business, and McDonald’s helped cement the milkshake as a fast food essential nationwide by the 1950s.
In Parts of New England, a Milkshake Is Something Else
If you order a milkshake in most of New England, you won’t get ice cream. You’ll get milk and flavored syrup, vigorously shaken or blended until frothy and creamy. It’s not chocolate milk: the difference is the aggressive shaking that creates a smooth, foamy texture. But it’s also not the thick frozen drink most Americans expect.
If you want ice cream in the mix, you need to order a “frappe” (pronounced “frap”). That distinction trips up visitors constantly. As one New England soda fountain worker described the typical exchange: a customer asks for a chocolate milkshake, gets asked whether they mean a milkshake or a frappe, and has to be told that ice cream makes it a frappe.
Rhode Island and parts of southeastern Massachusetts add another layer. There, the ice-cream version is called a “cabinet,” named after the kitchen cabinet where the blender was traditionally stored. It’s usually coffee-flavored and made with a local coffee syrup. So the same basic drink goes by three different names depending on where in New England you’re standing.
The Name Outlasted the Recipe
The word “milkshake” has survived for nearly 140 years while the drink itself has been reinvented multiple times. It started as shaken milk with whiskey and eggs, became a malted milk drink at soda fountains, gained ice cream in the 1920s, and was industrialized by fast food chains in the 1950s. The name stuck at each stage because the core concept never really changed: milk, shaken (or blended) with something good. The “shake” in the name is the one constant, a reference to the physical act of mixing that has connected every version of the drink from the 1880s to now.