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Coffee Sauce
(To be served with Vanilla Ice Cream) 1½ cups milk 1/2 cup ground coffee 1/3 cup sugar ¾ tablespoon arrowroot Few grains salt Scald milk with coffee, and let stand twenty minutes. Mix remaining ingredients, and pour on gradually the hot infusion which has been strained. Cook five minutes, and serve hot.
A thin hot coffee custard thickened with arrowroot, meant to be poured over vanilla ice cream. It comes together in about half an hour, most of it steeping time.
- The arrowroot quantityThe amount of arrowroot printed here is unclear; read as written it is not a usable measure. For 1½ cups of liquid, about ¾ tablespoon of arrowroot gives a sauce that coats a spoon without setting, which is what is wanted here.
- Grind and steepingUse a coarse to medium grind. Scald the milk to just below a simmer, add the coffee off the heat, and give it the full twenty minutes; the milk fat pulls out a rounder flavour than water would.
- Strain properlyA fine sieve lined with a coffee filter or a double layer of cheesecloth is worth the trouble. Grit suspended in the sauce is the usual failure.
- Do not boil the arrowrootArrowroot thickens at a temperature well below boiling and thins again if held at a hard boil. Bring the sauce just to the point of thickening over moderate heat, stirring, then pull it off; the original's five minutes is best read as gentle cooking rather than a rolling boil.
- Temper the starchMix the arrowroot with the sugar and salt dry, then add the hot infusion in a thin stream while whisking. Added all at once it will lump.
- Cornstarch as a substituteCornstarch works but wants a minute or two of actual simmering to lose its raw taste, and gives a cloudier, heavier sauce. Arrowroot stays clearer and glossier.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings over ice cream. Serve it hot and pour it at the table; held over heat it will thin.
Fannie Farmer's frozen-dessert recipes are accompanied by several small sauces of this kind, and their logic is contrast: a hot, lightly thickened pour over frozen cream, so the two meet somewhere in the middle. Arrowroot, milled from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea and imported chiefly from the West Indies, was a favoured thickener of the period for anything that had to stay translucent and glossy -- it was also sold as an invalid food, which kept it in respectable pantries. Steeping ground coffee in scalded milk, rather than brewing coffee and adding it, is one of the methods American cookbooks of the period used for coffee flavouring.