No. 3545

Ceylon with Coffee

Ceylan au Cafe

Put ten egg-yolks in a tinned basin; whip in three gills of very strong coffee and bring the preparation to twenty-two degrees with a syrup gauge; set the basin on a slow fire, stir and remove when it covers the spoon, then strain through a fine sieve; return it to the cleaned basin, beat again on ice till it attains a light consistency. Coat a mold (Fig. 674) with uncooked cinnamon ice cream (No. 3450), fill the center with the coffee composition, close forcibly, pack and freeze for one hour. Unmold and dress on a folded napkin and surround with vanilla lady bouchees (No. 3376).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a bombe: a mold lined with one ice cream and filled with a second, richer, unchurned mixture. The lining and the filling are made separately, and the filling is the part Ranhofer describes here.

Three gills of coffeeA gill is half a cup, so this is 1½ cups of very strong coffee for ten yolks. Take "very strong" at its word: coffee brewed well past ordinary drip strength, or it will vanish behind the sugar and cinnamon.
"Twenty-two degrees with a syrup gauge"The syrup gauge is a Baumé hydrometer, and the instruction means sweetening the yolk-and-coffee mixture with sugar syrup until it floats the gauge at 22° Baumé — a density equivalent to roughly 40 percent sugar by weight in plain syrup. (The yolks contribute solids of their own, so any reading taken on the finished mixture is an approximation.) Ranhofer gives no volume of syrup because the reading, not the quantity, is the target; without a hydrometer this figure is hard to judge by eye.
Tinned basinA copper bowl lined with tin, used because copper heats evenly and tin keeps the egg off the copper. A stainless bowl over barely simmering water does the same work with less anxiety.
"Remove when it covers the spoon"This is the hinge. The custard is done at about 180–185°F, when a drawn finger leaves a clean track on the back of the spoon. Past roughly 185°F the yolks scramble and no amount of sieving recovers the texture — hence the slow fire, the constant stirring, and the sieve immediately after.
"Beat again on ice till it attains a light consistency"The cooked base is whipped over an ice bath until cold and aerated; this bombe filling is never churned. Modern pastry practice usually folds an equal volume of softly whipped cream into the cooled pâte à bombe, which is what keeps an unchurned center from freezing to a brick.
Cinnamon ice cream, uncookedNo. 3450 is not given here; "uncooked" indicates it is made without a cooked custard step. Any good cinnamon ice cream serves. Line the chilled mold with a layer about half an inch thick, working quickly and pressing out air pockets.
Packing and freezing"Close forcibly, pack and freeze for one hour" assumes a sealed mold buried in ice and coarse salt, which pulls heat out far faster than a domestic freezer. In a home freezer allow at least six hours, and overnight is safer. Unmold by dipping the sealed mold in warm water for a few seconds.
Serving and yieldBombe molds of this type commonly hold about a quart, which would give eight to ten portions. The "vanilla lady bouchees" of No. 3376 are small vanilla mouthfuls ringed around the base; plain ladyfingers stand in perfectly well.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years of cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice chapter runs to hundreds of numbered recipes, among them bombes named for a place, a person or an occasion. The name here does real work: Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — was famous through the nineteenth century for both coffee and true cinnamon (Cinnamomum verum is still sold as Ceylon cinnamon), so the pairing of a coffee center in a cinnamon shell is the island on a plate. The coffee reference was already becoming nostalgic by the time Ranhofer wrote: Ceylon's coffee plantations were devastated by coffee leaf rust from the late 1860s onward and were largely replanted with tea, so that by the 1890s Ceylon was above all a tea name while the dish still honored what had made the island rich. The construction itself belongs to the era of ice-and-salt freezing, when a sealed mold packed in a tub could set a two-part dessert in an hour and the unmolding onto a folded napkin was part of the performance.