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BEVERAGES (Coffee Ice-cream from Custard)
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup strong sweetened coffee, cold. Coffee Ice-cream (from Custard) To two cups of left-over or fresh custard add one-half cup of good strong coffee and one-half cup of cream or rich milk, and sugar enough to make it quite sweet. Pour into the freezer and freeze.
Coffee Pudding (from Sponge-cake) 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup sugar 8 small, stale spongecakes 1 cup strong sweet- 3 yolks eggs ened coffee, cold Cream butter and sugar, add yolks of eggs, and beat very light. Cut sponge-cake into slices and spread with creamed mixture. Pour coffee over cake, put in mold, let stand, and turn out on dish.
Serve with whipped cream.
Two leftover-transforming recipes sit on this page: one turns yesterday's boiled custard into ice-cream, the other turns stale sponge-cake into a moulded coffee pudding. The second is the problem.
- The raw yolks in the puddingThe creamed butter, sugar and three egg yolks are never cooked at any stage — the cake and cold coffee add no heat, and the mould simply stands until set. Raw yolk held at room temperature in a butter-and-sugar cream is a Salmonella risk with no kill step anywhere in the method. Use a current icebox-cake or tiramisu recipe built on pasteurised eggs or a cooked sabayon base.
- "Let stand" is not a time or a temperatureThe original gives no indication whether the mould rests an hour on the sideboard or overnight in the cellar. In the period kitchen this would likely have meant a cool larder; in a modern one it is an open invitation to leave a raw-egg dessert at room temperature.
- The custard behind the ice-cream"Left-over custard" most likely means a stirred boiled custard of yolks, milk and sugar, cooked until it coats a spoon, though the recipe does not say so. If your custard came from the stove and was chilled promptly, the ice-cream is on ordinary footing; if it is a leftover of unknown age or was never properly cooked, discard it rather than freeze it.
- Freezing without a freezer"Pour into the freezer and freeze" means a hand-cranked ice-and-salt bucket, which churns and aerates as it chills. A modern ice-cream maker does the same job in 20 to 30 minutes; a container in the deep-freeze will give you a dense frozen block unless you stir it every half hour.
- Sweetness after freezing"Sugar enough to make it quite sweet" is left to the cook's judgement, and cold blunts sweetness, so a custard that tastes correct warm will taste flat frozen. Taste the base cold, before churning, and expect to want more sugar than seems reasonable.
- "Good strong coffee"In this period that generally meant a dark, long-boiled or percolated brew, closer to strong drip than espresso. Brew it strong and cool it fully before adding, so as not to thin the custard.
- YieldThe ice-cream base comes to roughly three cups before churning, plus sugar — about four modest servings.
- The cross in the ingredient listThe "+ cup butter" is an artefact of the original typesetting, where a fraction has been mangled. Read it as a part-cup quantity of uncertain size; the amount is genuinely ambiguous in the source.
Books of this kind treated the larder's remnants as raw material rather than waste, and custard and stale sponge-cake were two of the commonest things a nineteenth-century kitchen had to hand. A boiled custard was made in quantity for pouring over fruit or filling pastry, and it soured within a couple of days; sponge-cake, made without much fat, went stale faster than almost any other cake. Soaking stale cake in a sweetened liquid and moulding it is a long-standing household economy in European cooking, running from English trifle and tipsy cake through to charlottes and, later, tiramisu. Coffee as a dessert flavour appears in period American and British cookbooks in creams, ice-creams, jellies and moulded puddings like this one.