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Drink

Iced Coffee

A chilled beverage made from boiled sugar, water, black coffee, and double cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Iced Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the sugar and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the black coffee and double cream to the mixture.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture until solid.

  2. 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + coffeetop 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once dissolved in water, helps keep the frozen mixture softer.
Black coffee
Provides the main coffee flavour and bitterness that balances the sweetness.
Double cream
Adds fat, which makes the frozen result rich and smooth rather than icy.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture until solid. Freezing is slow and unstirred here, so large ice crystals can form and make the texture coarse. Cooks should expect the mixture to need time and should not assume a short freeze is enough.

“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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