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Coffee Ice Cream
Prepare a vanilla preparation. Strain one gill freshly made strong coffee into preparation, mix it well, strain into freezer and proceed to freeze and serve as the vanilla.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you already have the book's vanilla ice cream base in front of you. Everything hinges on adding the coffee as a small volume of very concentrated liquid rather than as a weak brew.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces.
- "Strong coffee" means strongAim for something closer to espresso or a double-strength drip brew. Ordinary breakfast coffee at this volume gives a pale, watery result, because the water dilutes the fat and sugar that keep the texture smooth.
- "Preparation" is the custard baseThis refers back to the book's vanilla preparation. Add the coffee to it cold rather than to a hot base, and before the mixture goes into the freezer, as the wording directs.
- "Freezer" is the churnThe freezer here is a hand-cranked bucket packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, commonly around three parts ice to one part salt by volume. A modern electric machine or a frozen-canister model does the same work; a still-frozen tray needs beating every 30 minutes.
- Chill hard before churningGet the coffee-flavoured base down to 40F or below, ideally overnight. Warm base churns slowly and freezes coarse.
- Strain twice, as writtenThe instruction to strain the coffee and then strain the whole mixture is not fussiness. Coffee grounds and any set custard threads read as grit in frozen cream.
- Ripening and yieldPack the finished ice cream and hold it two hours before serving so the flavour rounds out and the texture firms. The entry gives no quantity; the yield depends on the vanilla preparation it refers back to.
Coffee was among the earlier ice cream flavours in the European repertoire, appearing in eighteenth-century French and Italian confectioners' books alongside chocolate and cinnamon. Organising ice creams around a single vanilla base that the cook branched into several flavours by stirring in coffee, chocolate, caramel or crushed fruit was a common arrangement in cookbooks of this kind. That is why the entry is three sentences long and refers you elsewhere for the important part. The salt-and-ice churn it assumes was common domestic equipment from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the phrase "proceed to freeze" would have needed no explanation to any reader who owned one.