Home › Desserts › Coffee Sauce
Coffee Sauce
cup black coffee cup cream few grains salt Mix eggs, sugar, salt and coffee, and cook in double boiler until mixture thickens. Chill; add beaten cream and serve cold. 1 cup sugar cup water Boil sugar and and lemon juice.
A stirred custard sauce flavored with strong coffee and lightened with whipped cream, meant to be spooned cold over puddings, cake, or ice cream. The written proportions are incomplete, so treat the method rather than the numbers as the guide.
- ProportionsThe ingredient list has lost its fractions, and the eggs are called for in the method but never quantified. A standard stirred custard of this era runs about 3 egg yolks and 1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup liquid, but the original figures cannot be recovered from the text as printed.
- The hinge: heat controlA yolk custard sets between about 170 and 180F and curdles not far above that. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer, never boiling, and stir constantly until the sauce coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when you draw a finger through it.
- Black coffeeHere this means strong brewed coffee without milk, not espresso. Brew it roughly double strength so the flavor survives dilution by the eggs and cream; cold brew concentrate diluted to about drip strength also works.
- "Beaten cream"Cream whipped to soft peaks, folded in after the custard is fully chilled, as the recipe's own order directs. Folded into a warm base it will simply deflate and thin the sauce.
- StrainingPour the cooked custard through a fine sieve before chilling. It catches any threads of set egg and any coffee grounds, and costs nothing.
- Chilling and keepingCover the surface with plastic or a butter paper to stop a skin forming, and chill at least two hours. Being a soft-cooked egg sauce, it keeps two days refrigerated at most.
- YieldThe quantities of coffee and cream are lost with the fractions, so no firm yield can be given; whatever the base measures, the whipped cream roughly doubles in volume as it is folded in.
Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the early twentieth century it surrounds its chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household dishes. Coffee sauce belongs to the large family of stirred custards descended from the French crème anglaise, which American cookbooks of the period usually called soft custard or boiled custard and flavored with vanilla, caramel, coffee, or chocolate as the occasion required. Coffee was the everyday American beverage by 1900 and cheap enough to spare a cup for a dessert, and a coffee-flavored custard poured over plain cake made the sort of company dessert a cook could assemble from what was already in the kitchen.