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Cream Paste Flavored with Coffee
Roast six ounces of coffee, when it becomes oily put it into a saucepan with three breakfast cupfuls of boiling milk, cover over the pan, let it stand until nearly cold, and strain through a cloth. A small quantity of this should now be mixed with the yolks of six eggs and two tablespoonfuls of flour with a little salt in it, the whole put into a saucepan, and boiled slowly until it is such a consistence that it adheres to the spoon while being cooked. Add three ounces of butter slightly colored in a saucepan, also a quarter of a pound of loaf-sugar and the same quantity of powdered macaroons, stirring the whole until smooth and compact.
A flour-thickened coffee pastry cream, stiffened further with ground macaroons. The infusion is the whole point: this is coffee steeped in milk, not brewed coffee added to milk.
- Roasting the coffeeSix ounces of green beans roasted at home until the surface goes oily means a dark roast, close to the edge of burnt. Six ounces of dark-roast beans from a bag, coarsely cracked rather than finely ground, gives the same infusion without the smoke.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large cup, generally taken as 8 to 10 fluid ounces; three of them is somewhere between 3 and 3 3/4 cups (700-890 ml) of milk. The beans absorb some, so expect to strain back rather less.
- Steep, do not boilPour the boiling milk over the coffee off the heat, cover, and leave it to cool. Simmering ground coffee in milk pulls out bitterness and the cream turns harsh.
- The ambiguous "small quantity"The original has you slacken the yolks and flour with a little of the coffee milk, then says "the whole" goes into the pan. Read it as a standard pastry cream: make a smooth paste with a few spoonfuls, then whisk in the rest of the strained milk before cooking.
- Cook the flour outTwo tablespoons of flour in three cups of milk is a loose custard, and it must reach a full bubble for a minute or two so the starch cooks and the raw-flour taste goes. Coating the spoon is the visual cue; low heat and constant stirring keep the yolks from scrambling.
- Butter "slightly colored"Butter 'slightly colored' -- Melt the three ounces and let it take on a little color, then whisk it in off the heat. 'Slightly colored' stops short of a full beurre noisette, but the browning is doing flavor work, not enrichment alone.
- Loaf-sugar and macaroonsLoaf sugar is refined cane sugar sold in a cone; ordinary granulated or superfine sugar is the equivalent 4 ounces. Powdered macaroons means dry almond macaroons crushed to crumbs, a further 4 ounces, which thicken the paste as much as they flavor it. Coconut macaroons are not the same thing.
- Yield and useRoughly 3 to 4 cups of thick, spreadable paste, enough to fill a large layer cake, a tray of choux, or a dozen tartlets. It sets firmer as it chills; press plastic wrap onto the surface to stop a skin forming.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the 1890s produced, and its pastry section is essentially French. This is a creme patissiere au cafe, the flour-and-yolk custard that became the all-purpose filling for eclairs, gateaux and tartlets. Two details place it in its period: coffee bought green and roasted in the kitchen, a practice already giving way to packaged roasted coffee through the later nineteenth century, and sugar specified as 'loaf,' meaning it came as a hard mass to be broken and pounded. The ground macaroons give the paste an almond note and a body that flour alone would not.