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A Cafe Frappe
A cafe frappe, which is always delightful as an afternoon or evening refreshment, is simply made. To one quart of strong coffee sweetened to taste, add the beaten white of one egg and freeze. Serve it in glasses with whipped cream on the top.
The method is sound in outline — a sweetened coffee ice, lightened with beaten egg white — but the egg white here is never heated at any stage, and freezing does not make it safe.
- The raw egg white is the problemThe white goes into a quart of coffee and straight into the freezer. Nothing in the process brings it to a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, which can be present in the white as well as the yolk of a shell egg. Freezing suspends bacteria; it does not kill them.
- Why the egg was thereIn a hand-cranked freezer the beaten white acted as a stabiliser, keeping the ice smooth and slightly foamy instead of granular. A modern recipe achieves the same effect with a cooked meringue, pasteurised whites, or simply more sugar and a churn — use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
- "Freeze" in 1900"Freeze" here -- This means a packed ice-and-salt freezer turned by hand, producing a soft, spoonable ice rather than the hard block a domestic freezer gives. The instruction assumes agitation during freezing.
- YieldA quart of liquid plus whipped cream would serve several, though the recipe specifies neither the number of servings nor the size of glass.
Frappé is the French past participle of frapper, to strike, used of wines and other drinks that had been iced; in nineteenth-century usage it commonly described something iced to a slush rather than frozen solid, and it covered wines and fruit syrups as often as coffee. Café frappé suited the afternoon reception and the evening "at home", occasions where something cold and mildly stimulating was wanted but not a full dessert course. Its appearance in an American household book of this period reflects the spread of iced coffee drinks from hotel and confectioner's practice into the home, alongside the growth of commercial ice supply. Beaten egg white was a common household stabiliser of the era, used in the same way in sherbets and water ices.