Home › Frozen Dishes › Coffee Ice Cream
Coffee Ice Cream
Add one cup black coffee to French or Philadelphia Ice Cream. Freeze.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the base recipes from earlier in the book. The whole difficulty lies in the water the coffee brings with it.
- What the two bases arePhiladelphia ice cream is uncooked: cream, sugar, vanilla, stirred until the sugar dissolves. French ice cream is a cooked custard base with egg yolks. Either takes coffee; the yolks in the custard tend to give a softer freeze, and which base suits coffee better is a matter of taste.
- "Black coffee" means strong and unsweetened"Black coffee" means coffee taken without milk or cream, and here unsweetened. Since the coffee is diluting a cream or custard base, brew it strong -- roughly double normal strength, or use cooled espresso topped up. A full cup of ordinary drip coffee will thin the base noticeably and mute the flavour rather than adding it.
- Cool it completelyWarm coffee stirred into a cream base will thin it and, in a custard, risks curdling. Chill the coffee to refrigerator temperature and chill the finished mixture several hours before freezing.
- Water means ice crystalsA cup of coffee is essentially a cup of water, and water freezes hard and grainy. Compensate by adding a tablespoon or two of extra sugar, or reduce the coffee by half over low heat before cooling, which concentrates flavour and cuts the water.
- An alternative worth knowingSteeping coarsely ground coffee or crushed roasted beans directly in the hot cream or custard, then straining, gives flavour without adding liquid at all. Period cookbooks use both methods.
- FreezingThe original assumes a hand-cranked bucket freezer with cracked ice and rock salt, turned until the mixture stiffens. In a modern machine, churn 20 to 30 minutes, then ripen in the freezer two to four hours before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no size for the base. If the base you start from makes about a quart, the added cup of coffee brings it to roughly five cups before churning, enough for six to eight servings.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its frozen dishes section reflects the American ice cream repertoire at the turn of the twentieth century, when the hand-cranked bucket freezer had made ice cream a routine home dessert rather than a confectioner's specialty. The two bases the recipe names mark a real distinction of the period: Philadelphia ice cream is plain sweetened cream with no eggs, generally traced to that city's reputation for very rich dairy, while so-called French ice cream is built on an egg-yolk custard in the manner of a frozen crème anglaise. Coffee was one of the standard flavourings alongside vanilla, chocolate and caramel, and books of this era often handle such variations exactly as here, in a single line hung off a master recipe, on the assumption that the cook has already worked her way through the chapter.