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Coffee with Whipped Cream
Pour into each cup enough sugar to properly sweeten the coffee, and one tablespoonful or a little more of boiling milk. Have prepared some whipped cream, one pint whisked to a froth being required for a dozen cups of coffee. Fill the cups partly full with hot coffee, lay on top of each a spoonful or two of the whipped cream, stir it gently, and serve. Tea: How Made.
Black, green and Oolong tea are prepared as follows. First, never allow the teapot or other utensils kept for the preparation of tea to be used for any other purpose, and they should always be kept scrupulously clean. Place one ounce of tea in a teapot, with two gills of boiling water, and infuse for ten minutes, then add to this eight gills of boiling water, and after the lapse of a few minutes, stir with a teaspoon and allow it to stand. It should be served with sugar and cream.
Iced Tea, French Style Place in a teapot three tablespoonfuls of tea, pour over two and one-half quarts of boiling water, and turn it into a freezer. Sweeten with three tablespoonfuls of sugar, tightly cover the freezer, place it in a tub containing broken ice and salt a little higher than the height of the tea, turn it sharply by the handle, all round in different directions for five or six minutes, wipe the cover of the freezer well, to prevent any ice falling in, and with the aid of a ladle pour it into a cold pitcher or jar. Send to the table in glasses with slices of lemon, and sugar separately.
Three beverage entries run together here: coffee with whipped cream, a strong pot of hot tea, and iced tea churned in an ice-cream freezer. Only the last needs equipment most kitchens no longer keep.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. Two gills of boiling water is one cup; eight gills is one quart. The tea is therefore an ounce of leaf to five cups of water in total.
- That much teaAn ounce of leaf to five cups is roughly double modern strength, which is consistent with a service where every cup got sugar and cream. Scaled down, current practice is about 2 to 3 g of leaf per 6 oz cup.
- Ten minutes is too longBlack tea held ten minutes turns astringent as tannins keep extracting; three to five minutes is the usual range, and green tea two to three at well below boiling. The concentrated infusion is diluted afterwards, which lowers the strength in the cup, though it does not remove what has already been extracted.
- The two-stage infusionSteeping in two gills of water first and topping up with eight more concentrates and then dilutes, giving a single pot rather than a fresh brew per cup. The recipe does not say why the method was chosen.
- "Freezer" means the churnThe freezer is the metal can of a hand-crank ice-cream machine, packed in a wooden tub with broken ice and rock salt. Turning it by the handle chills the tea fast without diluting it. A pitcher in an ice bath, stirred, does the same job more slowly.
- Salt in the iceThe salt is there to drive the ice bath below 32F so the tea chills quickly; it is not meant to enter the drink. Wiping the lid before opening, as directed, keeps the brine out.
- Boiling milk in the cupA tablespoon of boiling milk goes into the cup with the sugar before the coffee is poured. It may take a little of the chill off the china, but the recipe does not say so and a tablespoon can do only so much.
- Whipped cream quantityA pint of cream whisked to a froth roughly doubles in volume, so a dozen cups get a generous serving spoonful each. Whip to soft peaks: stiff cream sits on the surface instead of stirring in.
- YieldThe tea entry makes about five cups; the iced tea makes two and a half quarts, or eight to ten glasses over ice.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms at a moment when American hotels were codifying beverage service as carefully as cookery, and these entries read like standing instructions to a staff rather than advice to a home cook. The insistence that teapots never be used for anything else reflects a real problem: tea leaves readily absorb odors, and a pot that had held coffee or been washed with strong soap would taint every subsequent brew. The iced tea is the more telling item. Iced tea is often traced in popular accounts to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, but sweetened cold tea appears in American cookbooks well before that, and the churn method here, borrowing the ice-cream freezer to chill a liquid quickly, belongs to a kitchen that already had ice and salt on hand daily. Calling it "French style" was likely a matter of prestige as much as provenance, the same instinct that put French names on so much of the Waldorf's card.