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Coffee Custards
(Very old French recipe.) Grind 2 ounces of freshly roasted Mocha coffee, add 1 cup of boiling milk, and set in a warm place 40 minutes. Strain it, mix it in the ordinary way, with sufficient milk and eggs to make 1 quart of custard, and pour into cups. Bake these in a pan of water, very carefully, and serve cold.
A pot de crème in all but name: coffee steeped in milk, thinned into a custard, and baked gently in a water bath. The original assumes you know the standard custard formula, so most of the work is filling in what it leaves out.
- Steep warm, not hotThe milk is boiled once, poured over the grounds, then held in a warm place — not kept at a simmer for 40 minutes. A covered jug on the back of the stove, or a bowl in a 150F oven, gives the same result without scalding the coffee bitter.
- Mocha coffeeOriginally beans shipped through the Yemeni port of Mocha, prized for a winey, chocolatey character. Any good medium-roast Arabica stands in; avoid dark or oily roasts, which turn harsh in milk. Two ounces is about two-thirds of a cup of ground coffee — a strong infusion, as intended.
- Strain twiceOnce to remove the grounds, through a coffee filter or muslin, and again after the eggs go in, to catch chalazae and any thread of set egg. Fine grounds will otherwise settle as grit at the bottom of each cup.
- "Mix it in the ordinary way"A common ratio for baked custard is 6 whole eggs, or 8 yolks, to 1 quart of liquid. Yolks alone give the silkier pot de crème texture.
- Sugar is assumedThe recipe never mentions it, because a baked custard was understood to be sweet. Figure 1/2 to 2/3 cup of sugar per quart, dissolved in the warm milk before the eggs go in, plus a pinch of salt.
- Oven and water bath325F is right; anything hotter curdles the edges before the centre sets. Set the cups in a deep pan, pour in boiling water to come halfway up their sides, and lay a sheet of foil loosely over the top to stop a skin forming.
- Doneness30 to 40 minutes for small cups. The custard should still wobble as a single mass in the middle when nudged; it firms as it cools. An instant-read thermometer at the centre should show 170-175F.
- Yield and servingA quart fills six to eight small cups or ramekins. The recipe says only to serve cold; chill several hours before serving — cold is when the coffee flavour reads clearest.
Coffee custard belongs to the French family of petits pots de crème, small baked custards flavoured by infusion rather than by extract: coffee, vanilla bean, chocolate, burnt caramel. The technique of steeping a flavouring in hot milk and then building a custard around it is older than any of those flavourings in Europe, and it is what allows coffee to be used here at all, since ground beans cannot simply be stirred into eggs and milk. The "Mocha" of the recipe is a place, not a style: al-Makha on the Red Sea coast of Yemen was for a long time the port through which nearly all coffee reached Europe, and the name clung to the bean long after the trade moved on.