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Coffee Ice-Cream
Put one breakfast cupful of ground coffee in a bottle with one pint of water, and allow it to steep all night, then strain it through a cloth previously rinsed in hot water. Beat twelve ounces of caster-sugar with one and one-half pints of cream, and mix this with the coffee. Place the mixture in a freezer, turn this about with one hand, and work the cream from the sides with the other. In this way, the cream can be frozen in a few minutes.
A cold-brew coffee concentrate folded into sweetened cream and churned — no eggs, no cooking, and no tempering. The whole thing hinges on the overnight steep.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. For ground coffee that is about 3 oz or more by weight against the pint of water, which is a very strong cold-brew concentrate by design — it has to survive dilution in 1.5 pints of cream.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster or baker's sugar; ordinary granulated will dissolve if you whisk the cream a minute or two longer. Twelve ounces is by weight, about 1 3/4 cups — sweet, but sugar is what keeps a churned cream scoopable rather than solid.
- The overnight steepSteeping cold rather than brewing hot generally extracts less of the bitterness a hot infusion gives up. Do it at room temperature or in the refrigerator, in a closed jar, for 12 to 16 hours.
- StrainingRinsing the cloth in hot water is not fussiness — a dry cloth wicks and holds back liquid, and any sizing or soap flavour in it goes straight into the coffee. Use damp muslin or a coffee filter, and let it drip rather than squeezing, or you will push fine sediment through.
- "A freezer"A pot or can set in cracked ice and salt, turned by hand while the setting cream is scraped in from the sides — the recipe's two-handed instruction only works with an open vessel, not a closed crank pail. An electric ice-cream machine does the same work.
- Beat, but not to whippedWhisk the sugar into the cream only until dissolved. Cream beaten stiff before churning will overrun and go foamy, and the mixture is thin enough that it needs the churn to build texture.
- Chill before churningThe coffee and cream should go into the machine at refrigerator temperature or colder. "Frozen in a few minutes" assumes a well-salted ice pail and a cold mixture; a warm base will churn for half an hour and still be slushy.
- Eggless textureWith no custard base this sets hard and dry after a day in the freezer. It is best eaten within a few hours of churning.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts before churning, closer to 2 quarts after — eight to ten servings.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a 900-page compilation in 1896. Coffee ices were a fixture of nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant menus. The recipe is also a reminder that "ice cream" in this period frequently meant no more than sweetened cream frozen with a flavouring, as distinct from the rich egg custards we now call French-style.