Home › Desserts › Coffee Custard
Coffee Custard
Use rule for Soft Custard, adding one fourth cup raw coffee to milk before scalding.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Soft Custard rule in front of you: roughly 2 cups milk, 3 eggs or 5 yolks, 1/3 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, stirred over hot water. Everything that can go wrong here goes wrong at the stove, not in the flavoring.
- The hinge: never let it boilSoft custard is cooked over simmering water, stirred constantly, and pulled the moment it coats the back of a spoon — about 170-175F. A few seconds past that and the eggs scramble into grainy threads that no amount of beating will smooth.
- "Raw coffee"The term is genuinely ambiguous in books of this period. In nineteenth-century trade and household usage it frequently means unroasted, green coffee, which gives a grassy, almost hay-like infusion; other writers appear to use it simply for coffee that has not been brewed — roasted beans, whole or coarsely broken. The book does not say which is meant here; roasted beans are the reading that tastes like coffee.
- Steep, then strainAdd the beans to the milk, bring it just to scalding (about 180F, when bubbles ring the pan edge), then cover and let it stand off the heat 15-20 minutes before straining the beans out. Pouring hot custard over grounds later will leave silt in every spoonful.
- If you use ground coffee insteadA quarter cup of ground coffee infuses far faster and far more bitterly than beans. Cut the steeping to 5 minutes and strain through a coffee filter or fine cloth, not a sieve.
- Sugar and eggs firstWhisk the sugar into the eggs before adding the hot coffee-milk in a thin stream. Sugar buffers the yolks and buys you a few degrees of insurance against curdling.
- RescueIf it begins to look grainy, pour it at once through a strainer into a cold bowl set over ice and whisk. Caught early, it comes back; caught late, it does not.
- Yield and servingYield follows whatever the book's base Soft Custard rule makes; enough for a few small glasses or cups. Serve chilled on its own, or as a pouring sauce over plain cake, poached fruit or a molded pudding — soft custard was often used as a sauce as well as a dessert.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of the 1900s it built outward from a handful of master rules — here, one Soft Custard formula that spawns variations in a line or two each. Soft or "boiled" custard is the American name for what French kitchens call crème anglaise, and flavoring it by steeping coffee in scalded milk is often said to give a rounder, less acrid infusion than brewed coffee, which would also thin the custard. That coffee appears at all in the dessert chapter is a reminder of how thoroughly it had become a household staple by then.