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Coffee Ice Cream
Mix 1 breakfast-cupful of strong clear coffee with another of boiling milk, 6 tablespoonfuls of finely sifted sugar, and the yolks of 6 eggs. Stir the custard over a moderate fire until it thickens, then add 1 pint of thick cream. Stir it again over the fire till the cream coats the spoon, but do not let it boil. Pour it out, when cold put it in a mould, and freeze in the usual way.
A straightforward egg-custard base flavoured with brewed coffee. Nearly everything here still works; the only real translation needed is in the vessels, the sugar and the phrase "freeze in the usual way."
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. Treat each as one generous cup, so about 1 cup coffee and 1 cup milk.
- Strong clear coffee"Clear" means filtered and free of grounds, not weak. Brew it at double strength or use a shot or two of espresso topped up with hot water; the dairy and sugar will flatten anything mild.
- Finely sifted sugarThis is caster or superfine sugar, sifted so it dissolves in the custard without graininess. Granulated works if you let it dissolve fully before the eggs begin to set.
- Thick creamHeavy or double cream, 36 percent fat or above. Anything lighter gives a thin, icy result once frozen.
- The hinge: do not boilThe recipe spells this out at the second stirring, and it is the whole game. Hold the custard between 170 and 180F until it coats the back of a spoon; above about 185F the yolks curdle and stirring will not bring it back. Strain the finished custard as insurance.
- Adding the eggsThe original mixes yolks with hot milk and coffee at the start. Pour the hot liquid into the yolk and sugar mixture in a thin stream while whisking, then return the lot to the pan over low heat.
- Chilling"When cold" means thoroughly cold. Refrigerate the custard several hours or overnight; a cold base churns faster and freezes smoother.
- Freeze in the usual wayAt the time this meant a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, then packing the mould in more ice and salt to set firm. An ice cream machine does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes, after which the ice cream can be pressed into a loaf tin or mould and hardened in the freezer for a few hours.
- YieldAround 1 1/4 quarts of base before churning, more once frozen; serves six to eight.
Coffee ice cream belongs to the older French tradition of the frozen custard, or glace aux œufs, in which a cooked yolk base rather than plain sweetened cream carries the flavour. Coffee was a natural candidate because it infuses cleanly into hot dairy, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confectioners' manuals list it alongside chocolate, vanilla and tea as a standard flavour of the ice room. What dates this particular version is not the recipe but the equipment: the instruction to pour the cold custard into a mould before freezing points to the ice-and-salt pail, where the churned mixture was packed into a decorative pewter or tin mould and buried in a fresh charge of ice to harden into shape for the table. A book of this era could assume its readers knew that process well enough to be told only to "freeze in the usual way."