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Coffee Cream
Boil together one pint of milk and cream and add a small lump of sugar and a pinch of salt. Roast four ounces of green coffee-berries in a fryingpan and put the beans while hot in with the cream, place the cover on the stewpan and let them steep until quite cold. Beat in with the cream the yolks of four eggs, strain it through a cloth twice, fill some breakfastcups with it and place these in a large stewpan containing enough water to reach to half their height; place the lid on and a few live coals on top of that and let the water simmer. When the cream is set, allow it to get cold and then turn it out of the cups.
This is a coffee pot de crème written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: the sugar is unspecified, the oven is a stewpan with coals on the lid, and the coffee is roasted to order. A few translations make it workable.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe custard must never approach a boil, or the yolks curdle and weep. In a modern kitchen, bake the filled cups in a water bath at 300-325F until the centers still wobble slightly, roughly 30-40 minutes for teacup-sized portions.
- Green coffee-berriesUnroasted beans, roasted in a dry pan just before use so they go into the cream hot and aromatic. Four ounces is about 115 g. Whole beans of a medium roast, warmed in a dry skillet, give the same infusion without the smoke and uneven scorching of pan-roasting green coffee.
- "A small lump of sugar"Genuinely ambiguous. Loaf sugar was broken into lumps of varying size, and a pint of custard with four yolks would take something like 2-3 tablespoons to modern taste, though "a small lump" may well mean less than that. Taste the strained mixture before filling the cups.
- Milk and cream"One pint of milk and cream" most likely means the two combined to a pint, not a pint of each. Half and half, or equal parts whole milk and heavy cream, is a reasonable reading.
- Live coals on the lidThe Dutch-oven trick for heat from above as well as below. An oven does this on its own; no lid is needed on the water bath beyond a loose foil tent if the tops color.
- Straining twiceThe recipe does not say why. The first pass would take out the beans; a second would catch any stringy bits of yolk or membrane.
- Steeping until coldThe hot beans go into the just-boiled cream and the covered pan is left until quite cold, so this is a hot infusion cooling slowly rather than a cold brew. It takes several hours and cannot be hurried.
- YieldA pint of custard base fills four to six small breakfast cups or ramekins. Unmolding is optional; these are usually served in the cups.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catalogues the standing repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, and this is a straightforward French petit pot de crème au café in English dress, of a type that had long been printed in European cookery books before him. The instruction to roast the coffee in the kitchen and drop the beans into the cream while still hot reflects a period when green coffee was sold by the pound and roasted at home or in-house, roasted beans going stale quickly in the days before vacuum packing. The stewpan of water is already a water bath, with the coals heaped on the lid supplying heat from above: gentle, surrounding heat for a custard, in a kitchen where an oven's temperature could not be trusted to hold.