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Café Diable
Per person: 2 tablespoons fine coffee of high roast, freshly ground 3/4 cup water Juice of 1/2 orange (Save the half-orange skin, scooped clean and dry.) Add pinches of cloves, vanilla bean, lemon peel and stick cinnamon to taste.
Boil all together as you would make plain coffee. Heat 2-3 tablespoons of cognac per person. Rub rim of empty half-orange skin in sugar. Place in cup snugly and pour your spiced coffee into this to drink it from the sugared orange skin, after sweetening to taste.
Float in hot brandy on the back of a spoon, making sure that it remains on top and comes level with the sugared rim. Then light it and begin to sip as soon as the flame dies down. Vanilla bean and cinnamon in the stick should always be used in preference to powdered or insipid liquid extracts.
A tableside flamed coffee, served in a hollowed orange half rather than a cup. The hinge is the float: the brandy must sit unmixed on the surface, or it will not light.
- Getting the brandy to floatWarm the cognac gently in a small pan or ladle — warm enough to give off vapour, not simmering. Pour it slowly over the back of a spoon held just at the coffee's surface so it spreads as a layer. Cold brandy sinks and mixes, and will not catch.
- The orange shellHalve the orange, juice it, then scoop the membrane out cleanly and dry the inside with a towel. Any pulp or moisture left behind keeps the sugar from sticking to the rim. Set the shell into a small cup or ramekin so it cannot tip.
- Boiling the coffee"Boil all together as you would make plain coffee" reflects an era of boiled or pot coffee, and the original does mean the grounds go in with everything else. If you would rather avoid the bitterness sustained boiling brings, bring the water, juice and spices to a boil, add the grounds off the heat, cover for a few minutes and strain.
- Grind and quantityTwo tablespoons of dark-roast coffee to 3/4 cup water is roughly the standard modern ratio, and reads as strong here mainly because of what is added to it. The recipe calls for a fine grind; a medium grind is easier if you are straining through a fine sieve, since fine grounds pass through and muddy the drink.
- Whole spicesThe instruction to use vanilla bean and cinnamon stick rather than extract is sound: extracts are alcohol-based and their flavour flashes off in a boil, while whole bark and bean release slowly into hot liquid. A 1-inch piece of cinnamon, three cloves, a split inch of vanilla bean and a strip of lemon zest per person is a reasonable starting point.
- Sweetening orderSweeten the coffee before the brandy goes on — once the spirit is floated, stirring will ruin the layer. Sugar on the rim is decorative and caramelises slightly as the flame passes over it.
- Flame safetyLight it away from anything overhead, keep the bottle well back from the shell, and never add more spirit to a lit drink. The flame on 2-3 tablespoons of cognac burns nearly invisibly in bright light and goes out on its own after a short while; the shell will be hot.
- YieldThe quantities are given per person, so multiply directly.
Flamed coffee with spirit and citrus belongs to a family of nineteenth- and twentieth-century restaurant theatrics — café brûlot, café diable, café royale — in which the point is as much the performance as the drink. The New Orleans brûlot is the best-known American relative, traditionally served in a special footed bowl with the peel cut in a long spiral and the burning brandy ladled over it. "Diable" simply means devil, the standard culinary shorthand for anything spiced, peppery or, as here, on fire.