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Coffee Cream
Boil in a saucepan one pint milk, a pint cream and half teaspoon vanilla essence for one minute. Place five egg yolks in a bowl with four ounces sugar and briskly mix with whisk until well amalgamated, then gradually pour milk, etc., over eggs and sharply whisk while adding. Pour in saucepan again, set pan on fire and thoroughly mix five minutes, but do not allow to boil. Remove to a table. Place an ounce very strong freshly ground coffee in a small coffee pot, then pour over a gill boiling water, cover and let infuse fifteen minutes, then strain through a double cheesecloth into the cream. Strain cream through a cheesecloth into a bowl and let thoroughly cool off. When entirely cold send to table in the bowl with six saucers and a plate of any kind of small cakes on hand.
This is a crème anglaise flavoured with a coffee infusion, served cold in the bowl as a spoon dessert or a pouring sauce. The whole thing turns on not letting the custard boil.
- "Set pan on fire"This means put the pan back on the heat, a literal rendering of the French mettre sur le feu. Use low heat, or a bowl over barely simmering water if you are cautious.
- The hinge: temperatureEgg yolks thicken around 160-170F and scramble by about 180F. Stir constantly with a spatula until the custard coats the back of a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean line; five minutes is a guide, not a rule. If it does catch, strain it at once and whisk hard.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Poured over an ounce of coffee that is roughly a third of a cup of grounds, which gives a very concentrated infusion rather than a drinkable brew.
- The coffee infusionFifteen minutes in a covered pot is a long steep and will pull bitterness from a fine grind. A coarser grind, or a shorter steep tasted as you go, gives a cleaner coffee note.
- Vanilla in the boilVanilla essence boiled with the milk loses much of its aroma. Adding it off the heat at the end, with the coffee, keeps more of it.
- StrainingBoth strainings matter: the coffee grounds are fine enough to pass an ordinary sieve, and the second pass through cheesecloth catches any threads of set egg.
- CoolingCool it uncovered but stir occasionally, or lay plastic film on the surface, or you will get a skin. Chill thoroughly; the flavour is flat when it is merely tepid.
- YieldSix saucers, as the recipe says: a little over a quart of finished cream, roughly three quarters of a cup each. As a sauce for cake or poached fruit it will stretch further.
Coffee cream here is not the dairy product an American grocer sells under that name but a custard in the French manner, crème anglaise flavoured with a coffee infusion rather than steeped beans. The instruction to "set pan on fire" and the closing direction to "send to table" read as a chef's idiom carried over into English. Infusing very strong coffee separately and stirring it into a finished custard, rather than steeping grounds in the milk, keeps the dairy from picking up bitterness and lets the cook judge the strength before committing.