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Coffee Ice Cream
Add one-half cup of black coffee to either of the recipes for vanilla cream.
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This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's vanilla cream base in front of you. The whole difficulty lies in adding half a cup of liquid to a set formula without wrecking its texture.
- "Black coffee" means strong brewed coffeeIn this period the phrase meant coffee without milk, not espresso. Brew it roughly double strength, since half a cup of ordinary drip coffee will taste faint once it is buried in cream and sugar and served ice cold. Cool it completely before it goes anywhere near the base.
- Compensate for the added liquidHalf a cup of coffee is half a cup of water, and water is what makes ice cream icy. Take an equal amount out of the milk in the vanilla base, or steep coarsely ground coffee or crushed roasted beans directly in the hot milk and strain them out instead, which gives flavour with no added water at all.
- Which vanilla base to chooseThe word "either" tells us the book gives two vanilla cream recipes, though this page does not say what distinguishes them; domestic manuals of the period commonly paired a cooked egg custard with an eggless cream-and-sugar "Philadelphia" style. If the book's pair follows that pattern, the custard suits coffee well; cook it to 170-175F on a thermometer so the eggs are safe and the base thickens enough to coat a spoon.
- Sugar and freezing pointCoffee is bitter and slightly acidic, and cold blunts sweetness further. Taste the chilled base before freezing and expect to add a spoonful or two of sugar; note that extra sugar also softens the finished cream, so do not overdo it.
- The old freezer, and yoursA recipe of this date would have been frozen in a hand-cranked bucket packed with cracked ice and rock salt, commonly around three parts ice to one part salt by volume. A modern churn does the same job in 20-30 minutes; a still-frozen version works if you beat the mixture thoroughly two or three times as it sets.
- RipeningPeriod instructions often call for the packed freezer to stand an hour or more before serving, though nothing on this page says so. That step is worth keeping: two to four hours in the coldest part of the freezer firms the texture and lets the coffee flavour round out.
- YieldThis depends entirely on the vanilla base chosen, which the page does not reproduce; check the yield given with whichever base you use, plus the extra half cup of coffee.
Coffee is often said to be among the older flavours in the English and American repertoire, and coffee ices do appear in eighteenth-century confectioners' books; eighteenth-century ices were flavoured with whatever was expensive and aromatic, and roasted coffee qualified. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, the pattern seen here seems to have been a common approach in domestic manuals: give one or two thoroughly worked-out vanilla bases, then run a column of one-line variations off them - coffee, chocolate, caramel, pistachio - to save both type and the cook's time. The brevity is a sign of how routine ice cream had become in the middle-class American kitchen, where the crank freezer had moved from a luxury to an expected piece of summer equipment.