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Café Frappé
1 quart clear coffee 1 cup thin cream 1 cup sugar Dissolve the sugar in the hot coffee, add the cream and freeze to a mush.
A two-ingredient list for a three-ingredient drink: the coffee itself was left off the ingredient panel, though the method depends on it. Treat this as a coffee granita served semi-frozen rather than a solid ice.
- The missing coffeeNo quantity is given for the hot coffee, and the original is genuinely ambiguous on this point. Something in the region of 2 to 3 cups of strong brewed coffee to a cup of sugar and a cup of cream will work; more coffee gives a leaner, more granular ice.
- Thin creamThis means light or coffee cream, in the region of 18 to 20 percent butterfat. Light or table cream is the closest match; half-and-half will serve if that is unavailable. Heavy cream is likely to thicken toward butter under prolonged cranking and mutes the coffee.
- Sugar is structuralA full cup is not merely sweetness. Sugar depresses the freezing point, which is what keeps the mixture at the soft, slushy stage instead of setting hard. Cutting it substantially will give you a coffee ice block.
- Dissolve while hot, then chillThe original dissolves the sugar in the hot coffee and adds the cream straight away. In a modern kitchen it is easier to cool the sweetened coffee before adding the cream, both to save freezing time and to reduce any risk of the cream separating against hot, acidic coffee.
- "Freeze to a mush"The instruction assumes a crank freezer with ice and salt, turned only until the mixture is thick and grainy, not smooth. In a modern kitchen, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours, or run it briefly in an ice cream machine and serve at once.
- Yield and servingWith 2 cups of coffee this makes about a quart, enough for four to six small glasses. Serve in glasses with a spoon; it collapses quickly, so it goes to table straight from the freezer.
Frappe, from the French frapper, to strike, came in culinary use to mean iced or chilled, and described a drink or dessert frozen only to a slush rather than to a firm ice; by the early twentieth century American cookbooks used the word for exactly this kind of half-frozen coffee, fruit or tea preparation. Such recipes belong to a period when ice was reliably available to middle-class households but electric refrigeration was not: the hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt made a mush far more easily than a smooth, well-ripened ice cream, and coffee frappe had the advantage of costing almost nothing beyond the morning pot.