Mix 1½ cups of strong coffee with ½ cup of rich milk in a double boiler; add ½ cup of sugar, 1 tablespoonful of gelatin and a pinch of salt. Then stir in the yolks of 3 eggs beaten with ½ cup of sugar until it thickens. Remove from the fire; add the whites beaten to a froth and a teaspoonful of vanilla. Pack in a mold and freeze until hard and serve with whipped cream.
A coffee custard set with gelatin and frozen in a mold — closer to a semifreddo than to churned ice cream. The recipe assumes a still-freezing setup and a cook who knows when a custard is done.
- The hinge: don't let the custard boilThe yolks go into hot coffee and milk over a double boiler and must be stirred until the mixture coats the spoon, around 175F. Direct heat or a moment of inattention curdles it, and gelatin will not rescue a broken custard.
- GelatinOne tablespoon is about one and a third standard 1/4-oz envelopes of powdered gelatin. The recipe adds it straight to the hot liquid; it is safer to soften it in a few tablespoons of cold water or cold coffee first and then dissolve it in the hot custard, since sprinkling it dry into hot liquid can leave rubbery threads.
- Sugar, twice overHalf a cup goes into the coffee and milk, another half cup is beaten with the yolks — a full cup in all. That is high by modern taste but deliberate: sugar keeps a still-frozen dessert from setting up as a solid brick.
- The uncooked whitesThe whites are folded in after the pan leaves the heat and are never brought to temperature. Residual warmth is not reliable pasteurization, so use pasteurized whites if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, or leave them out and lean on the whipped cream.
- "Freeze until hard"Packed in a mold and left undisturbed, this freezes coarse and icy. Either churn it in an ice cream maker before molding, or stir the partly frozen mixture two or three times during the first two hours; four to six hours total in a home freezer.
- Strong coffeePeriod "strong coffee" was drip or boiled coffee, roughly double-strength brewed rather than espresso. Freezing mutes flavor considerably, so err toward the strongest brew you would still drink.
- Unmolding and yieldDip the mold briefly in warm water and invert; the gelatin gives it enough body to hold its shape. Makes about a quart, serving four to six.
This book runs a dish a day for a year, each pinned to a country, and the national labels are often looser than they look — what makes this one "Italian" is coffee as a dessert flavor, long established in Italian kitchens for ices and creams. The construction, though, is thoroughly turn-of-the-century American: a stirred egg custard stiffened with a spoonful of powdered gelatin, a convenience that became available to home kitchens once granulated gelatin was sold in packets from about 1890, replacing the tedious business of boiling down calves' feet or shredding isinglass. Gelatin also solved a practical problem in a household without a churn or a reliable freezer: it holds a molded frozen cream together and masks some of the graininess that comes of freezing a mixture without agitation. The folded-in whites and the crown of whipped cream put the result somewhere between a frozen mousse and what Italians would call a semifreddo.