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Coffee Frappe
Make a quart of strong black coffee and stir into it five tablespoonfuls of sugar and a cupful of cream. When cool, turn into your freezer and grind until stiff. Serve in glasses.
A frozen coffee ice, halfway between granita and soft ice cream. The whole thing hinges on how far you take the freezing.
- "Grind until stiff"This means a hand-crank ice cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt, turned until the paddle drags. Frappe generally implied something half-frozen rather than solid, though this recipe's own word is "stiff"; taken too far it becomes a coffee ice cream without enough fat to stay smooth.
- Without a freezerPour into a shallow metal pan, freeze, and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about 3 hours. An ice cream machine works too; churn 20-25 minutes and serve straight away.
- Strong black coffeePeriod coffee was usually boiled or percolated, and "strong" here probably means well above ordinary brewing strength. Freezing dulls both bitterness and aroma, so brew at least twice your usual strength, or use 1 cup of cold-brew concentrate topped up to a quart with water.
- CreamPeriod cream was variable, but generally closer to modern light cream or half-and-half than to heavy cream; heavy cream will churn firmer and richer than intended.
- SugarFive tablespoons for a quart-plus is restrained by modern taste and by ice-cream physics — sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable. Dissolve it in the coffee while hot, and taste before freezing, since cold mutes sweetness noticeably.
- Chill before churning"When cool" should mean refrigerator-cold, ideally several hours. A room-temperature mix freezes with coarser crystals and takes far longer in the machine.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/4 quarts, serving six in small glasses. Serve immediately in chilled stemmed glasses; it hardens and turns icy on standing.
Frappé is the French past participle of frapper, to strike or chill -- and by the late nineteenth century it was widely used on American menus for things served half-frozen, whether a fruit ice, a punch or a cup of coffee. Coffee frappe belongs to the era when the hand-crank ice cream freezer, cheap and widely sold from the mid-1800s onward, put frozen desserts within reach of ordinary households rather than confectioners alone. This is a small, cold, faintly showy thing requiring no baking and no great expense beyond ice. The same impulse survives in the frappés and blended iced coffees of modern coffee shops, though the name has drifted a long way from anything churned in a salted bucket.