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Dessert

Coffee Mousse

A chilled dessert made from coffee, sugar, egg yolks, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Coffee Mousse

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Make a syrup by combining sugar and hot strong coffee.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the beaten egg yolks while beating continuously.

  3. Cool the mixture and then fold in the stiffly beaten cream.

Freeze

  1. Fill a mold with the mixture and pack it in equal parts cracked ice and salt.

  2. Let it stand for three to four hours after turning the freezer for a few minutes and removing the dasher.

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).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Sugar
Sweetens the coffee and dissolves into the syrup that forms the base.
Strong coffee
Provides the main coffee flavor and dissolves the sugar into the syrup.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the base, helping it hold together as it chills.
Thick cream
Adds richness and, when whipped, air that gives the mousse its light texture.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the yolks. Adding hot syrup while beating continuously gradually warms the yolks without scrambling them, keeping the base smooth and evenly thickened.

“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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