Coffee Cream
Dissolve one and one fourth ounces Cooper's isinglass in a half pint of cold water. Boil for two hours, one tea cup of whole coffee in a pint of cold water. Boil down to one half cup strong coffee, add one tea cup of the melted isinglass, put them in a Farina kettle with one half pint milk, strain, let it boil up once or twice, then sweeten with granulated sugar. Whip one pint cream, and stir it in with the rest of the ingredients after it is cool. Wet a mould and place on ice to harden.
A cold coffee bavarois set with fish gelatin. The two things that decide whether it works are the strength of the gelatin solution and folding the cream in only once the base is properly cool.
- IsinglassIsinglass is gelatin made from sturgeon (later other fish) swim bladders, sold in shreds or leaves; Cooper's was a widely stocked brand. Ordinary powdered or leaf gelatin does the same job, but the substitution is not one-for-one and the recipe compounds the problem by dissolving 1¼ oz and then using only one teacup of the resulting half pint — roughly half. Treat the quantity as approximate, chill a spoonful of the finished base to test the set, and adjust before you fill the mould.
- TeacupA teacup in this period is about half a cup, not a modern mug. The coffee is measured as a teacup of whole beans, boiled and reduced to half a cup of liquid.
- Farina kettleA double boiler, sold for cooking cereals. The gentle indirect heat keeps the milk from catching and the gelatin from scorching, which matters here because the mixture is only brought to a bare boil.
- Two hours of boiling coffeeLong boiling of whole beans was one way to get a concentrated coffee extract in a domestic kitchen, but it draws out hard, bitter tannins along with the flavour. Half a cup of any very strong brewed coffee gives a cleaner result for the same purpose.
- Strain, and whenThe straining step is there to catch the beans and any undissolved gelatin. The recipe places it before the mixture is boiled up, which is the sensible order — a mixture that has begun to set is much harder to push through a sieve.
- Cool before foldingThe hinge of the recipe. If the base is still warm the whipped cream deflates and the dessert sets dense rather than light. Cool it until it is cold and beginning to thicken but still pourable, then fold the cream in.
- Wetting the mouldA film of cold water between the cream and the metal lets the set dessert release cleanly. Skip it and the mould will need a longer dip in warm water, which melts the surface.
- Setting and yield"On ice" means a bed of ice or an icebox; four to six hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, is safer. The mixture comes to roughly a quart and a half, filling a large mould and serving six to eight.
Coffee cream belongs to the family of moulded, gelatin-set creams — bavarois in French kitchens, "cream" in Anglo-American ones — that were prominent in the dessert course of the later nineteenth century, when a shaped, turned-out sweet showed off a competent cook. Isinglass was the prestige setting agent before commercial powdered gelatin took over: clearer and less liable to the glue-like taste of cheap calf's-foot preparations, and sold under trade names such as Cooper's that appear in recipe books as though they were generic ingredients. The instruction to "place on ice" assumes a household with a reliable supply of ice, an urban middle-class convenience rather than a universal one. Coffee as a flavouring, rather than only a drink, appears increasingly in American dessert cookery in the same decades, often alongside chocolate and vanilla.