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Coffee Ice Cream
Make with pure sweet cream only, and 1 pint of very strong clear coffee to 3 quarts. Sugar as usual--8 ounces to a quart. The best coffee for this purpose is made by steeping coarsely ground coffee in cold water over night and not boiling it at all. Hot coffee from the urn will answer if taken when fresh made and not inky.
A Philadelphia-style ice cream — no eggs, no cooking, nothing but cream, sugar and coffee. The whole thing hangs on the coffee being strong enough to survive being diluted six to one by cream and buried under sugar.
- The proportions, scaled downAs written this yields roughly 3.5 quarts of base, which no domestic machine will handle. A quarter batch is 3 cups heavy cream, 1/2 cup cold-brew concentrate and about 7 oz sugar, following the recipe's own 8 ounces to the quart — a little over a quart of finished ice cream.
- Sugar is measured by weightEight ounces to the quart works out to about 240 g per litre of base, well above modern practice of roughly 150-175 g. Sugar also depresses the freezing point, which would have helped keep the mixture soft in a hand-cranked freezer that could not hold a steady temperature. Cutting to 6 oz per quart gives a cleaner coffee flavour, but the result will freeze harder and want ten minutes on the counter before scooping.
- "Pure sweet cream"Sweet cream means unsoured, as opposed to cream that had turned. Use heavy or whipping cream at 36% fat or better; anything labelled light cream will give a thin, icy result at this sugar level.
- The cold-steeped coffeeThis is cold brew, described long before the name caught on, and the instruction is sound. Coarsely ground beans steeped in cold water overnight and strained give a concentrate with very little of the bitterness that turns metallic against dairy. Something in the region of 1 part coffee to 4 parts water by weight works, and strain through a fine cloth — grounds left in suspension will read as grit in the frozen cream.
- "Not inky"Urn coffee held over heat develops the harsh, tannic edge the author is warning against, and cold and sugar both flatten flavour, so what tastes merely strong at room temperature tastes weak frozen. Whatever coffee you use should taste slightly too intense straight.
- FreezingThe original assumes a bucket freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Chill the base thoroughly first — at least four hours, ideally overnight — then churn in any modern machine until it holds a soft ribbon, and firm it in the freezer for two to three hours.
- No eggs, no cookingNothing here is heated, so the texture depends entirely on fat and sugar rather than custard. It will be leaner and icier than a French-style coffee ice cream, and noticeably better on the first day than the third.
Nineteenth-century American confectioners divided ice creams into two camps: the French sort, built on a cooked egg custard, and the Philadelphia sort, which was cream, sugar and flavouring and nothing else. This recipe takes the Philadelphia road, which let the flavouring speak without the muffling effect of yolks. The cold-steeping instruction is the striking part: here is cold-water coffee extraction, a way of getting concentration without the bitterness of a boiled or urn-held brew, long before it appeared on café ferry menus as cold brew. The warning against "inky" coffee is a glimpse of the era's commercial urns, which kept coffee hot for hours and stewed it in the process.