Skip to main content
Dessert

Coffee Cream

Coffee Cream is a chilled dessert made by steeping coffee in milk, sweetening, mixing with egg yolks, thickening, and freezing.

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

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 ↓

Coffee Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Roast the coffee until it is a rich, even brown, being careful not to burn it.

  2. Pour the hot coffee over the milk and cover closely.

  3. Let it sit for one hour.

  4. Sweeten the mixture to taste.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the mixture until scalding hot.

  2. Stir the hot mixture into the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Return the strained mixture to the heat.

  5. Cook until it thickens.

Cool and freeze

  1. Cool the mixture.

  2. Freeze the mixture.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they cook and add richness and a smooth custard texture.
Milk
Forms the base of the cream and carries the coffee flavour.
Coffee
Gives the cream its main flavour and aroma.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and softens the flavour of the coffee.

The step that matters

Cook until it thickens. Egg yolks set as they heat, so the custard must be cooked gently and stirred, and stopped once it thickens. Overheating can curdle the eggs into a grainy texture.

“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.

More coffee cream recipes

Ice 7Spanish 5Substitute 4 See all 124 →

You might also like

Coffee Ice CreamCoffee Ice Cream91 recipesCoffee CustardCoffee Custard27 recipesCoffee CakeCoffee Cake21 recipesCoffee Bavarian CreamCoffee Bavarian Cream14 recipes