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Coffee Parfait

Coffee-flavored ice cream topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Coffee Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee cream

  1. Place the ground coffee in a muslin bag and drop it into a double boiler with ½ quart of cream.

  2. Cook slowly for 20 minutes.

  3. Squeeze the coffee bag to remove excess liquid.

  4. Strain the cream and let it cool.

  5. Add the remaining ½ quart of raw cream.

Freeze and ripen

  1. Freeze the mixture.

  2. Repack the ice cream.

  3. Let it stand for 1 hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Whip the pint of cream.

  2. Keep the whipped cream on ice while the ice cream ripens.

  3. Stir the whipped cream into the ice cream.

  4. Serve in glasses.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the frozen base a smooth, creamy body.
Mocha and java coffee
Supplies the main coffee flavor, infused into the cream during slow cooking.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and keeps the frozen texture softer by limiting large ice crystals.
Whipping cream
Adds air when whipped, lightening the texture of the finished parfait.

The step that matters

Keep the whipped cream on ice while the ice cream ripens. Cold keeps the cream's fat firm so it holds its air bubbles. Warm whipped cream loses volume and turns heavy when folded into the frozen base.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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