Home › Coffee Cream › Coffee Cream
Coffee Cream
1027. Boil a calf's foot in water till it wastes to a pint of jelly clear of sediment and fat, make a teacup of very strong coffee, clear it with a bit of isinglass. To be perfectly bright, pour it to the jelly with a pint of very good cream and as much lump sugar as is pleasant; give it one boil up, and pour it into the dish; it should jelly, but not be stiff.
A cold coffee cream set on calf's-foot stock, from the era before packaged gelatine. The whole dish turns on a very soft set and on not letting the cream break.
- The hinge: one boil onlyCream, strong coffee and sugar brought repeatedly to the boil will curdle and the coffee will turn bitter. Bring it just to the point of rising, take it off, and pour out at once.
- Calf's foot, replacedA pint of jelly boiled down from a calf's foot is simply unflavoured gelatine stock. Butchers rarely sell the foot now; powdered gelatine or leaf gelatine does the same work. For a quart of liquid set soft enough to wobble rather than slice, count on roughly 1 tablespoon of powdered gelatine (about 4 leaves) — err low, since the recipe explicitly wants it "not stiff."
- Isinglass here is a clarifierThe isinglass is not the setting agent. It is a fining, used as in brewing to drop the fine coffee grounds so the liquid runs bright. A paper filter or a double coffee filter achieves the same clarity with no fish bladder involved.
- A teacupA teacup in this period is usually reckoned at roughly 4 to 5 fl oz (about 1/2 to 2/3 cup). "Very strong" suggests something close to espresso strength, since it will be diluted by a pint of cream.
- SugarLump sugar is ordinary white sugar in loaf form; granulated is identical in effect. "As much as is pleasant" for a quart of coffee cream lands around 3 to 4 oz, or 6 to 8 tablespoons.
- Cream"Very good cream" means high fat — use double or heavy cream, not single or half-and-half, or the set will be thin and watery in flavour.
- Setting and servingPour into a shallow dish or individual glasses and chill 4 to 6 hours. A pint of jelly with a pint of cream fills about eight small glasses. Serve cold, spooned rather than turned out.
Before boxed gelatine, a calf's foot simmered for hours was a common domestic source of setting power, used for creams, blancmanges and invalids' jellies. This coffee cream shows the technique turned to luxury rather than nursing. The insistence that the jelly be "perfectly bright" reflects the period's concern with clarity in set dishes, which is also why isinglass — a fish-derived fining also used in brewing — appears here for polish rather than for structure. The British Cookery Book, compiled by J. H. Walsh from contributed and gathered receipts and published in 1859, is full of such numbered entries written for cooks who already knew what a boiled-down foot looked like and needed only the proportions.