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Coffee Pastry Cream
1 pint of clear, ver strong coffee. 1 pint of cream. Use these instead of the quart of milk, and make according to directions for common pastry-cream.
On board ships and steamers where milk for cooking purposes can seldom be obtained, all the pastry-creams are made nearly as good with water. An ounce of butter extra is then needed.
The reader perceives that as cream fillings a variety of dissimilar compounds here come together. They are alike, however, in being each one adapted for several uses, for spreading on toast, cakes, filling tarts, tartlets, pies, etc., besides filling cream puffs. In another point they are all alike, and one being learned the rest become the easier for it. They all have to be stirred over the fire till thickened--that one touch of cookery makes the whole lot kin. Five different English cook books contain directions for making the simple base of several conserves, to follow here presently, that is what is called there transparent pudding, and on this side is pretty well known as transparent pie. Only two of the five give the essential point of cooking the mixture over the fire before the pies are filled with it, and one of these copies verbatim from the older one, except the change of a single word. One says stir till like buttered eggs, the other says till like batter. The consequence of it is that the mixture put into the pies raw will rise and look fine, but when done will go down and become like wax; whereas if previously cooked it remains light and delicious.
This is a variation, not a standalone formula: it swaps the liquid in the book's "common pastry-cream" and assumes you have that base in front of you. A few notes on translating it.
- You need the base recipeThe eggs, sugar, flour or cornstarch all come from the "common pastry-cream" entry; only the liquid changes here. A workable modern base for 1 quart of liquid is about 6 egg yolks, 1 cup sugar and 3/4 cup flour or 1/2 cup cornstarch, but use the book's own proportions if you have them.
- Pints and quartsA pint is 2 cups, so this is 2 cups coffee plus 2 cups cream standing in for the 4 cups of milk. American pints and quarts here, not imperial.
- "Ver strong coffee"A typesetting slip for "very strong." Brew at roughly double normal strength. Whether the coffee goes in hot or cold depends on the book's own base directions; if hot, temper it into the eggs gradually rather than pouring it in at once. Cold-brew concentrate diluted to double strength works well.
- The hinge: cook it throughThe whole point of the closing paragraph is that the mixture must be stirred over the fire until it thickens before it goes into the shells; the recipe says the raw mixture rises, then sinks and "become[s] like wax," while the pre-cooked one stays light. For a flour- or starch-thickened cream, bring it to a full bubble and hold it there a minute, stirring hard.
- Stirring vesselUse a heavy-bottomed saucepan and a flat whisk or wooden spatula that reaches the corners. Coffee and sugar scorch readily, and a scorched patch will flavour the entire batch.
- The water versionThe shipboard advice to use water plus an extra ounce (2 tablespoons) of butter is in the text and still useful if you want a dairy-light filling, though the result is noticeably leaner; the book itself claims it is "nearly as good."
- Yield and keepingAbout 4 to 4 1/2 cups' worth, or enough to fill roughly two 9-inch tart shells or four dozen small cream puffs. Cool it with a sheet of plastic pressed to the surface, refrigerate, and use within two days; this is an egg custard and does not keep at room temperature.
Jessup Whitehead's The American Pastry Cook, a Chicago imprint of the mid-1890s, came out of the world of hotel and steamer kitchens, and the digression about shipboard cooking is a real glimpse of that trade: pastry cooks on passenger steamers could seldom obtain milk and learned to build creams on water and butter instead. Coffee as a pastry flavouring was well established by then, and the recipe simply substitutes brewed coffee for part of the liquid. The last half of the entry is Whitehead doing what he did best and most combatively, picking a fight with earlier cookbook writers who copied one another's "transparent pudding" without understanding it. His complaint that only two of five English books bothered to cook the mixture before filling the shells is a fair reminder that nineteenth-century cookbooks were largely compiled from other cookbooks, errors and all.