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Kafe Frappe
A kafe frappe, which affords a pleasant change from the too familiar coffee jelly, is simply made, and is delightful as a refreshment. To I coffee of as a refreshment. To 1 quart of strong coffee, sweetened to taste, add the beaten white of 1 egg, or a tablespoonful of gelatin, dissolved in a little cold water, and freeze. Serve in tall glasses, with whipped cream on top.
A quart of sweetened coffee, lightly bound and frozen soft. The text carries an obvious typesetting stutter in the second sentence — "To I coffee of as a refreshment" is a duplicated fragment and can be ignored; the working instruction begins at "To 1 quart of strong coffee."
- What "frappé" means hereNot a blended drink and not a hard-frozen ice. The aim is a coarse, slushy, spoonable crystal that can be piled into a glass. Overchurning it smooth defeats the point.
- Freezing without an ice-cream freezerThe original probably assumes a hand-crank freezer packed in salt and ice, though it says only "freeze." Pour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and drag a fork through the crystals every 30 minutes for about 3 hours. A machine works too, but pull it while still loose.
- Strong coffee"Strong coffee" in period usage probably means something on the order of double-strength drip or boiled coffee, not espresso. Cold and freezing mute aroma, so brew it stronger than you would drink it.
- Sweeten past the point of comfortCold suppresses perceived sweetness sharply. Coffee sweetened correctly at room temperature will taste thin and bitter frozen; sugar also keeps the crystals from setting into a solid block.
- The egg white, and the alternativeThe white is beaten raw into the coffee and never heated — it is there purely to keep the mixture light. If that is a concern, take the gelatin option the recipe itself offers, or use pasteurized whites.
- The gelatinA tablespoon is a little more than one modern envelope (about 8-9 g). Soften it in a few tablespoons of cold water, then stir it into the coffee while the coffee is still hot enough to dissolve it completely, and chill before freezing.
- YieldA quart serves four tall glasses generously, or six modest ones. The whipped cream on top should be unsweetened, since the coffee base is already sugared hard.
The spelling kafe frappe is a phonetic rendering of the French café frappé — frapper meaning to strike or, in the kitchen, to ice. The recipe's opening jab at "the too familiar coffee jelly" fits a period when packaged gelatin had become cheap and reliable in late nineteenth-century America and coffee jelly with cream was a standby of the domestic table. This entry takes much the same materials and freezes them instead. That the recipe treats beaten egg white and gelatin as interchangeable is telling; both were valued less for flavour than for their ability to hold air and slow the growth of ice crystals in an era before commercial stabilisers and gums.