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Coffee Ice Cream
1 quart cream 1½ cups milk 1/3 cup Mocha coffee 1¼ cups sugar ¼ teaspoon salt Yolks 4 eggs Scald milk with coffee, add one cup sugar; mix egg yolks slightly beaten with one-fourth cup sugar, and salt; combine mixtures, cook over hot water until thickened, add one cup cream, and let stand on back of range twenty-five minutes; cool, add remaining cream, and strain through double cheesecloth; freeze. Coffee Ice Cream may be served with Maraschino cherries or in halves of cantaloupes.
A classic French-style custard base flavored by steeping ground coffee in the scalded milk. The technique is sound; only the vessels and the freezing method have changed.
- The coffee"Mocha coffee" means the bean, not a chocolate-coffee blend — originally Yemeni coffee shipped through the port of Mocha. The printed measure is unclear in this copy; the straining through double cheesecloth indicates ground coffee steeped in the scalded milk rather than a brewed infusion.
- Sugar and saltThe sugar totals about 1¼ cups, divided as the method describes: one cup into the scalded milk, a quarter cup beaten with the yolks. Salt is a quarter teaspoon.
- Cook the custard to a number"Until thickened" over hot water corresponds to roughly 170–180°F in modern terms, when the custard coats a spoon and holds a drawn line. Much above that the yolks risk curdling, and straining will only partly disguise it.
- "Back of range"On a coal range the back was the cooler zone — roughly a very low burner or a covered pan off direct heat. The twenty-five minutes serves mainly to infuse the coffee, with the custard held warm rather than actively cooked.
- StrainingThe double cheesecloth removes the grounds and any coagulated egg. Do not skip it; ground coffee left in the base tastes gritty and turns bitter as it sits.
- Chill before churningThe base should be fully cold before freezing, ideally after several hours in the refrigerator; the recipe itself says to cool it. An ice-and-salt churn tolerates a less thoroughly chilled mix better than a frozen-bowl machine.
- YieldRoughly two quarts once frozen — the liquid ingredients alone come to about seven cups. It is a rich base, so portions can be small.
The book appeared as commercial ice cream was still a luxury and home freezing in a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and rock salt was common, so ices and ice creams occupy a substantial chapter. Coffee ice cream belongs to the older French tradition of frozen custards — cream, sugar, and egg yolks — rather than the eggless "Philadelphia" style also common in American books of the period. Mocha, the Red Sea port through which Yemeni coffee reached Europe for centuries, had by 1900 become a general term in cookbooks for a fine, aromatic coffee; the association of the word with chocolate came later. Serving the cream in a hollowed cantaloupe half was a fashionable summer presentation of the era, when melons and ice arrived in the same season and both signaled a well-provisioned kitchen.