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Cafe Frappe
3/4 Cup White Corn Syrup 1 Quart Strong Coffee 1 Quart Cream 1 Tablespoon Cornstarch Directions: Cook the cornstarch in the coffee till thickened. Add the syrup and when cold, add the cream. A little sherry may be stirred in before freezing. Serve in sherbet or champagne glasses.
A frozen coffee cream in the soda-fountain style, thickened with a little cornstarch so it freezes smooth rather than icy. The whole method hinges on cooking the starch properly and chilling the base completely before the cream goes in.
- Cook the starch outSlake the tablespoon of cornstarch in a few spoonfuls of cold coffee first, then stir it into the rest at a simmer and hold it a full two minutes after it thickens. Undercooked starch tastes chalky and will not do its job of keeping ice crystals small.
- Chill before the cream"When cold" means genuinely cold — refrigerator temperature, not merely off the boil. Adding a quart of cream to warm coffee gives you a warm base that must then be chilled anyway, and dairy sitting at room temperature is worth avoiding.
- Strong coffeeRead this as something like double-strength drip or percolator coffee; three to four tablespoons of ground coffee per cup of water is about right. Ordinary breakfast-strength coffee produces a bland, milky frappé once a quart of cream dilutes it.
- CreamUnqualified "cream" in books of this kind could mean anything from light to heavy; heavy or whipping cream will give the smoothest result, while half-and-half or light cream freezes harder and coarser.
- White corn syrupBroadly the light corn syrup sold today. It is used here as much for texture as sweetness — the syrup interferes with crystallisation and keeps the mixture soft — so replacing it entirely with granulated sugar will give a harder, more brittle result.
- The sherryNo quantity is given. Two to three tablespoons for the full batch is enough to register; much more and the alcohol will keep the mixture from setting firm.
- FreezingAlmost certainly intended for a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer, and it suits a modern ice cream machine directly. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it thoroughly with a fork or in a processor two or three times as it sets, or it will freeze into a solid block.
- YieldA little over two quarts of base, which is a dozen or more of the small stemmed glasses the recipe calls for.
Frapp orm of of frapper, to strike, used of drinks packed in ice — the same word behind the frozen coffee drinks sold at American soda fountains from the late nineteenth century onward. Café frappé of this kind sits somewhere between an ice cream and an iced beverage, thin enough to be served in a stemmed glass and drunk as much as eaten. Its presence in a bride's cook book is telling: this is a dish for entertaining, requiring a quart of cream and a freezer full of ice at a time when both were an outlay, and the instruction to serve it in sherbet or champagne glasses makes clear that the point was the table as much as the flavour. The optional sherry places it before Prohibition in spirit, if not necessarily in date.