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Coffee Cream Filling
Scald milk with two tablespoons ground coffee, strain, and make same as Cream Filling. make same as Cream Filling.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have the book's Cream Filling in front of you and changes only the milk. The whole of the recipe is in the infusion, so that is where the attention goes.
- What the base filling isCream Filling in books of this type is a stirred pastry cream: milk thickened with flour or cornstarch and egg, sweetened, usually flavored with vanilla and cooked over hot water. Read the base recipe as printed in this book before starting, and treat this page as an instruction to swap plain scalded milk for coffee-infused milk.
- Scald means just below boilingBring the milk to about 180F, when it shivers and a skin forms at the edge, then take it off the heat. Two tablespoons of ground coffee is a light infusion for the quantity of milk a cream filling usually takes; covering the pan and letting it stand about 10 minutes off the heat draws more coffee flavor than scalding alone.
- Strain properlyGround coffee leaves grit that a colander will not catch. Pour through a fine-mesh sieve lined with a doubled layer of cheesecloth or a paper filter, and make up any milk lost in the grounds so the flour-to-liquid ratio holds.
- Or use brewed coffeeStrong brewed coffee or a shot of espresso stirred into the finished filling works, but it thins it. If you go that way, replace an equal volume of the milk rather than adding liquid to the full quantity.
- Cook the starch outThe hinge of any flour-thickened cream: let it come to a full bubble and hold it there a minute or two, stirring, after it thickens. Short of that it tastes pasty, and the egg's amylase will thin the filling as it sits.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface so no skin forms, and chill before spreading. Warm filling will slide out from between cake layers.
- Yield and keepingYield follows the base Cream Filling recipe, so check the quantity given there. It is a custard: refrigerate, and use within two days.
- The doubled line"make same as Cream Filling" appears twice; this is a duplication in the text as it comes down to us, not a second step.
Coffee as a cake flavoring rather than a drink shows up steadily in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, and this entry shows how it was done in the domestic kitchen: dry grounds steeped in hot milk, then strained out, exactly the way vanilla bean, cinnamon or bitter-almond flavorings were handled. The base preparation is the French cr cme p tissi re, which American writers called simply cream filling and used for layer cakes, cream pies and the split buns sold as cream cakes. Building a book from a base recipe with short variations hung beneath it cwhich is why this page is two lines long cwas already a common way of organizing nineteenth-century American and English cookbooks.