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Drink

Iced Coffee

A chilled beverage made by mixing brewed coffee with heated milk, sweetened, and served over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,202 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Iced Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare a quart of coffee as for black coffee.

  2. Heat a quart of milk, but do not boil it.

  3. Pour the coffee and milk into an ice cream freezer.

  4. Sweeten with a little powdered sugar.

  5. Cover the freezer.

Freeze and serve

  1. Place the freezer in a tub of ice and rock salt, higher than the pot of coffee.

  2. Turn the handle of the cover in various directions for five minutes.

  3. Serve in coffee glasses with additional powdered sugar.

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. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Brewed coffee
Provides the main coffee flavor and liquid base of the drink.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the coffee's bitterness.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves easily in the cold liquid.

The step that matters

Place the freezer in a tub of ice and rock salt, higher than the pot of coffee.. Salt lowers the melting point of the ice, letting the brine get colder than ice alone so the coffee mixture can freeze. Keeping the freezer surrounded by this brine is what chills the mixture enough to turn it into a slush.

“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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