No. 45

Mocha Cream

Creme Moka

Put into a tinned basin sixteen egg-yolks and one pound of sugar; beat and dilute with a pint of very strong coffee and a pint of boiling milk. Set the basin on the fire, stir with a small whip, pressing it against the bottom, bring the liquid to a boil, without allowing it actually to boil, then remove from off the fire, let stand till cold. Put sixteen ounces of butter in a vessel, heat it lightly and work it well to a cream, then pour it into the preparation and stir the whole vigorously with a whip.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a coffee buttercream in its nineteenth-century form: a stirred custard, cooled, then beaten into an equal weight of creamed butter. The Epicurean gives no yield, no temperature and no timings, so the hinge is temperature control at two separate points.

The hinge: match the temperaturesButter and custard must be at the same cool room temperature, roughly 68F, before they meet. Cold custard into soft butter seizes into curds; warm custard melts the butter and the emulsion breaks into a coffee soup.
"Bring to a boil without allowing it to boil"That is a nappe custard: 180-185F on a thermometer, thick enough to coat the whip. Past about 190F the yolks scramble, and this mixture has no starch to protect them.
Tinned basinA copper bowl lined with tin, set directly over the fire and stirred hard against the bottom. A heavy stainless saucepan over medium-low heat does the same job; a bowl over simmering water is slower but far more forgiving.
Quantities in modern termsA pint is 2 cups, so the custard base is 1 quart of liquid against 16 yolks, 1 lb (2 1/4 cups) sugar and 1 lb (4 sticks) butter. This is Delmonico's banquet scale, on the order of five pints of finished cream; a quarter batch is plenty for a layer cake.
It is looser than a modern buttercreamWith that much liquid and no flour or cornstarch, the result is a soft, pourable cream rather than something you can pipe. Chill it well before using it as a filling, or reduce the coffee and milk by half if you want it stiff enough to spread on the sides of a cake.
"Very strong coffee"Read this as a concentrated infusion, far stronger than ordinary drip coffee. Two shots of espresso topped up to a cup, or coffee brewed at double strength, gets you there; weak coffee produces a pale cream that tastes only of butter.
Strain, and saltPass the cooked custard through a fine sieve before cooling to catch any set threads of yolk. Butter of the period was often salted; if using unsalted butter, add a good pinch of salt with it.
KeepingRefrigerate and use within three days. Bring it back to room temperature and re-whip before spreading, or it will tear the crumb of the cake.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is his attempt to set down the whole of that kitchen's practice, from state dinners to the plain building blocks a pastry cook needed by heart. This entry sits among the "Elementary Methods" precisely because it is not a dessert in itself but a component, filed alongside frangipane and pastry cream and expected to turn up inside a cake, a charlotte or a row of choux. "Moka" is the French confectioner's word for coffee-flavored, taken from Mocha, the Yemeni Red Sea port that gave Europe its first regular supply of coffee beans; by Ranhofer's day the name signaled a flavor rather than any actual provenance, much as it still does. The recipe's structure, a cooked yolk custard beaten into creamed butter, is the older French crème au beurre, and the enormous yolk and butter counts are a fair reminder that this was a restaurant kitchen buying eggs by the case.