Home › Beverages, Ices and Candies › Artificial Cream for Coffee
Artificial Cream for Coffee
Beat well one egg, with one spoonful of sugar; pour a pint of scalding hot milk over this, stirring it briskly. Make it the night previous.
VI. Chocolate.
THE rule for chocolate is, two ounces of the cake, grated or thinly sliced, to each pint of boiling milk. Put the chocolate into a pot fitted with a “muller," pour on the boiling milk by degrees, mulling it as you proceed, over a slow heat, until it is hot and frothy. Or it may be frothed, fairly, with any of the modern whiskers for beating eggs.
When chocolate is used every day, a cake of chocolate is dissolved in a pint of boiling water by mulling it, but not on the fire. When mulled, set it on the fire until it boils up. It will keep ten days or more in a cool place. When used, mix in proper proportion with milk, and mull as heretofore directed. VI1. Refreshing Drinks.
Most persons drink too much, and, especially in hot weather, too much at a time. To drink a little slowly, is the way to quench thirst. Ice-water, especially, should be drunk sparingly. A most excellent substitute for it is pounded ice, taken in small lumps in the mouth, and allowed to dissolve upon the tongue. This will prove refreshing, and much more enduring in its effects.
This entry solves a nineteenth-century problem — no cream in the house — with a method that modern food handling cannot endorse. The notes below explain the specific failure rather than offering a substitute.
- The egg never reaches a safe temperatureThe egg is never cooked to a verified temperature -- A pint of scalding milk poured over one beaten egg may or may not carry the mixture through the range where Salmonella is destroyed; nothing is measured and the mixture is never returned to the pan. A stirred custard is safe because it is cooked to temperature over heat, and this one is not.
- And then it is held overnight"Make it the night previous" meant a cold larder or a cellar at best. An egg-and-milk mixture left at room temperature for eight to twelve hours is close to an ideal growth medium, and any organisms present in the egg multiply through the whole quantity. Overnight standing is central to the recipe, and only proper refrigeration would address the risk.
- It is added to hot coffee, not cooked in itA spoonful stirred into a cup of coffee is diluted and cooled, not pasteurised. The finished drink is well under a safe holding temperature within seconds. If cream is wanted for coffee, use cream, evaporated milk, or a current recipe for a cooked custard base.
- "One spoonful" and "one egg" are both looseThe book gives no spoon size and no egg size, which was normal for the period; a nineteenth-century egg was often smaller than a modern large egg. There is no measured ratio here to work from even if the method were sound.
- The transcription runs on past the recipeEverything from "VI. Chocolate" onward belongs to the following entries in the drinks section, not to the cream. The chocolate rule is a separate recipe and the paragraph on refreshing drinks is a general health note, not an instruction.
- A "muller" is not a modern toolIn the chocolate entry that follows, the muller is the wooden swizzle or molinillo turned between the palms inside a tall chocolate pot to raise froth. The book already concedes that "any of the modern whiskers for beating eggs" — a wire whisk — will do the same work.
Cream for coffee was a genuine domestic difficulty before mechanical refrigeration and daily bottled delivery: milk came in, cream rose, and it soured on its own schedule rather than the cook's. Egg was one available stand-in, since a beaten yolk carries enough fat and emulsifier to give thin milk something like the body and colour of cream, and the same logic underlies richer drinks of the period such as egg nog, milk punch and the raw-egg "prairie oyster" tonics. That this appears in the beverages chapter alongside a chocolate pot with a muller and a short lecture on drinking ice water sparingly is characteristic of compendia of the kind, which treated drink-making, thrift and health advice as one subject. The confident overnight storage tells you more about the period than the recipe does: cool cellars and larders were assumed, and the risk this instruction carries was simply not visible to the writer.