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Coffee with Whipped Cream
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For six cups of coffee of fair size, take one cup sweet cream whipped light with a little sugar; put into each cup the desired amount of sugar and about a table-spoon boiling milk; pour the coffee over these and lay upon the surface of the hot liquid a large spoonful of the frothed cream, giving a gentle stir to each cup before serving. This is known to some as meringued coffee, and is an elegant French preparation of the popular drink. Chocolate served in this way is delicious. - Marion Harland.
A method rather than a formula: strong hot coffee, a spoonful of scalded milk, and lightly whipped cream floated on top. The points below cover the few places where nineteenth-century terms and vessels differ from ours.
- "Sweet cream" means fresh, not sweetenedIn this period sweet cream is simply cream that has not soured or been ripened for butter — the opposite of sour cream, not a reference to sugar. Use heavy or whipping cream; the sugar is added separately, and only a little.† One cup of cream yields roughly two cups whipped, enough for six generous spoonfuls.
- Cup sizeA "cup of fair size" here is a coffee cup of roughly 5 to 6 fl oz, not a modern 12 oz mug. Six of those come to about a quart of brewed coffee. Scale the cream up if you are serving in larger cups, or the froth disappears into the liquid.
- Whip soft, not stiffThe cream has to be loose enough to spread across the surface and then stir in smoothly. Stop at soft peaks that just hold their shape; whipped to stiffness it sits on top as a lump and refuses to combine.
- The spoonful of boiling milkThe recipe gives no reason for it, but a tablespoon of scalding milk in the bottom of the cup would take some of the raw edge off the coffee and help keep the cold cream from chilling the cup.
- Everything must be hotWarm the cups first. Cold porcelain plus cold cream will drop a small cup of coffee below drinking temperature quickly, and the froth collapses as it cools. Assemble and serve immediately.
- Sugar in the cupSugar goes into the cup before the coffee so it dissolves in the hot liquid; adding it after the cream has been floated means stirring the froth to nothing. Keep the sugar in the whipped cream to a teaspoon or so for the whole cup of cream.
- The chocolate versionFor the variation mentioned at the end, use drinking chocolate made with milk rather than a thin cocoa; it is heavier than coffee and supports the cream well. The recipe says only that chocolate may be served "in this way"; the tablespoon of boiling milk may be unnecessary if the chocolate is already made with milk.
- YieldSix cups "of fair size", as stated. One cup of cream whipped gives each cup a large spoonful.
Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, a Virginia-born novelist who became one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the later nineteenth century after Common Sense in the Household appeared in 1871. Compilations of the period borrowed recipes from her and credited her by name, which is likely why her signature sits at the foot of this entry. Topping coffee with whipped cream in the French manner — what she calls "meringued coffee" — is close to the café Chantilly or Viennese styles usually associated with the coffee houses of Vienna and Paris. Whipped cream was hand labor then, beaten with a whisk or a syllabub churn, so a spoonful of it floated on a cup of coffee was no small trouble.