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Creme, Mocha
Place two egg yolks in saucepan with a teaspoon flour, two tablespoons powdered sugar and one and a half gills milk, sharply whisk while heating for six minutes, remove, then strain through Chinese strainer into a bowl. Set bowl on ice, briskly whisk until thoroughly cold, pour in two tablespoons exceedingly strong coffee and mix well. Incorporate little by little an ounce fresh butter, sharply whisking while adding, then use as required.
This is a coffee-flavoured pastry cream enriched with butter — in modern terms a light mocha buttercream, thin enough to fill a sponge or layer into a charlotte. The instructions are terse in the way professional French-trained cooks wrote for each other, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: cook the custard, do not scramble itTwo yolks with only a teaspoon of flour give little protection, so the mixture can curdle if the pan gets near a boil. Keep it on moderate heat, whisking constantly, until it thickens and coats the whisk. The six minutes is a guide, not a rule.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is three-quarters of a cup (about 180 ml) of milk.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" means granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the correct substitution.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the fine conical sieve. Any fine-mesh strainer does the job; the point is to catch any threads of set egg before the cream is chilled.
- Chill before the butter goes inThe bowl on ice is not optional. If the base is still warm the ounce of butter melts and the cream separates into a greasy pool. It must be cold to the touch, and the butter soft but not oily, added in small pieces with hard whisking.
- "Exceedingly strong coffee"Two tablespoons must carry the whole flavour, so use espresso or coffee brewed at several times normal strength, cooled. Instant espresso powder dissolved in a spoon of water is closer to the intent than a cup of drip coffee.
- YieldSomething over a cup, given the milk, yolks, sugar, coffee and butter that go in. It is easily doubled.
- KeepingBecause it is a cooked egg cream with butter, treat it as perishable: refrigerate and use within two days, and bring it back to spreading temperature by whisking rather than warming.
"Mocha" as a flavour name comes from Al-Mukha, the Yemeni Red Sea port through which European coffee was shipped in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before Java and the West Indies took over the trade; by the nineteenth century the word had detached from any particular bean and simply meant strong coffee flavouring, especially in confectionery. A crème au moka of this kind — a thin flour-bound pastry cream, chilled and then mounted with butter — belonged to the French professional repertoire whose vocabulary this book borrows, used to fill génoise, éclairs and the layered gâteau moka. The instruction to "use as required" suggests this is not a dessert in itself but a component, to be referred to from other pages. Its presence here reflects the period when hotel and restaurant cooking in the United States was largely French in method and terminology, down to the chinois and the bowl of ice.