Iced Coffee
Add cream and sugar to freshly made coffee, and chill. Serve in tall glasses, with a spoonful of whipped cream in each glass.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make good coffee. The only real decisions are strength and how you chill it.
- Brew it strongCoffee for chilling should be brewed noticeably stronger than you would drink hot, since cream and any melting ice will dilute it. Roughly half again as much ground coffee as usual is a safe starting point.
- Sugar goes in hotThe recipe sweetens before chilling for a reason: granulated sugar dissolves cleanly in hot coffee and grits in cold. If you prefer to sweeten later, use a simple syrup.
- Chill fast, not slowCoffee left to cool slowly at room temperature is generally reckoned to taste flat and stale. Cool the pot in an ice-water bath, or pour the hot brewed coffee directly over a full glass of ice to set it quickly.
- "Cream" in 1914"Cream" here -- probably what we would call light or single cream rather than the roughly 36 percent heavy cream sold for whipping, though period cream varied. Half-and-half is a reasonable modern stand-in for the coffee itself; keep the heavy cream for the topping.
- The whipped creamWhip it unsweetened or barely sweetened, to soft peaks only. The coffee underneath is already sugared, and a stiff, sugary cap sits on the surface instead of dissolving down into the glass.
- IceThe recipe does not mention ice; cracked ice was a common serving choice in drinks of this kind. Large cubes or a single large piece melt more slowly and keep the drink from going watery halfway down.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon on about 6 oz of chilled coffee per tall glass; how many glasses a pot fills depends on whether its "cups" are 5-6 oz coffee measures or full 8 oz ones.
Iced coffee had circulated in American cookbooks since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, and is sometimes traced further back to French cafés serving cold coffee in summer. The brevity here is telling: the compiler assumes every reader already keeps good coffee in the house and needs only to be reminded that it can be served cold, in a tall glass.