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Coffee Cream
Make a breakfast-cupful of strong, clear coffee; add half a pint of boiling cream to it; beat them well together; sweeten with two table-spoonfuls of sugar, and, when cool, add a small pinch of salt, the well-beaten yolks of six eggs, and the whites of two. Stir the mixture over the fire for a few minutes, to thicken it, pour it into glasses, and serve with a little sifted sugar on the top of each glass. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for this quantity. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
This is a stirred coffee custard — a crème in the older sense, meaning a spoonable cream rather than dairy cream — and it succeeds or fails on the temperature of the pan.
- Never let it boilWith six yolks and two whites and no starch, the mixture sets fast. Cook it over a low flame or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, and pull it off between 170 and 180F (77-82C), when it coats the back of the spoon. Above that it scrambles and no amount of beating will smooth it.
- Breakfast-cupfulA Victorian breakfast cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz — take it as a generous cup, roughly 250 ml, of coffee brewed strong. Filter or press coffee is fine; the recipe's 'clear' probably means free of grounds.
- Half a pint of creamIn an English book of this date that is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 285 ml. Single cream or a mix of double cream and whole milk gives the right richness; all double cream makes it cloying.
- Temper, do not dumpThe recipe has you cool the sweetened coffee-and-cream before the eggs go in, which is sound. If it is still warm, whisk a ladleful into the beaten eggs first, then return everything to the pan.
- EggsSix yolks plus two whites for roughly a pint of liquid is a rich custard by modern standards. Victorian eggs generally ran smaller than today's large eggs, so five yolks and one white may give a comparable set with current sizes.
- Strain and chillPass the finished custard through a fine sieve straight into the glasses to catch any threads of set egg. It thickens considerably as it cools; the recipe does not specify chilling, but creams of this kind were generally served cold, so give it several hours.
- The sugar on top"Sifted sugar" is caster or icing sugar dusted over just before serving. Do it at the table — on a chilled custard it dissolves into a damp film within minutes.
- Yield and costSix to eight small glasses, as stated, at a probable cost of 1s 6d for the quantity.
In nineteenth-century English cookery books a "cream" was rarely just cream: it was a dessert built on cream, usually thickened with eggs or gelatine and served cold in glasses. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for the newly enlarged middle-class household, carries dozens of them — lemon cream, chocolate cream, ratafia cream — largely variations on the same custard base with a different flavouring. The provision of a "probable cost" is characteristic of the book: its readers were expected to keep accounts, and a recipe that fed eight for eighteen pence was information as much as instruction.