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Cafe-Au-Lait
Half a cup of quite strong coffee, half a cup of sugar, yolks of two eggs; cook until it thickens, then add half a pint of whipped cream. Pack in ice.
— Miss F. Victoria Myers
This is a frozen coffee parfait rather than a drink — the custard is cooked, lightened with whipped cream, and set in ice without churning. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: cook the custard over waterYolks, sugar and coffee will curdle over direct heat before they thicken. Use a double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water and stir constantly until the mixture coats a spoon, around 175F, then cool it completely before the cream goes in.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup of heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks — roughly two cups whipped. Fold it into cold custard; if the base is still warm the cream deflates and the mixture freezes hard and grainy.
- "Quite strong coffee"Aim for something at espresso or strong drip strength, about a quarter cup of ground coffee to half a cup of water. Freezing mutes flavour considerably, so a coffee that tastes slightly too intense at room temperature is about right.
- SugarHalf a cup of sugar to half a cup of coffee reads as very sweet, but sugar is also what keeps a still-frozen dessert from setting into a brick. Cut it by more than a couple of tablespoons and the texture suffers.
- "Pack in ice"The original means burying a covered mould in a pail of crushed ice layered with coarse salt — roughly three parts ice to one part rock salt — for three to four hours. A freezer at 0F does the same work; a loaf pan or metal mould, covered, needs four to six hours.
- No churning requiredThe whipped cream supplies the air that a crank freezer would otherwise beat in, so there is no need to stir during freezing. This is the parfait method, and it is why the recipe gives no instruction to work the mixture.
- YieldSomething over a pint once the cream is folded in, enough for four small glasses. Let it stand five minutes before serving; from a modern freezer it may well be harder than the ice-and-salt version.
Café au lait means simply coffee with milk, and the name was applied in nineteenth-century American cookbooks to coffee-flavoured dishes as well as to the drink — a beverage, a custard, or, as here, a frozen cream. The method is the parfait or biscuit glacé approach: a cooked yolk-and-sugar base folded with whipped cream and frozen still, without the labour of a crank freezer. That mattered in a household cookbook. Before mechanical refrigeration, frozen desserts depended on ice cut from ponds and rivers in winter and kept through the summer in an icehouse. A recipe that needed only a pail, salt and a few hours of packed ice put ice cream within reach of a kitchen that owned no freezer, and the attribution to a named contributor suggests a community cookbook.