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Cafe Frappe

A chilled whipped cream coffee beverage with powdered sugar, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Cafe Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the frappé

  1. Brew strong coffee by covering 1 mill of coffee with 2 cups of water and letting it steep until you have 1 cup of coffee.

  2. In a large bowl, whip the cream until it forms soft peaks.

  3. Gently fold in the powdered sugar, salt, lemon juice, and brewed coffee.

  4. Freeze the mixture for a short time until it is slightly firm.

Serve

  1. Serve in punch 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. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + coffeetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together578 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cream
Whipped into foam, it traps air and gives the frappé a light, airy body.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the cold cream mixture.
Strong coffee
Provides the coffee flavor and a bitter depth that balances the sweetness.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Fold gently after whipping. Whipped cream is a foam held up by trapped air. Stirring vigorously or overmixing pops those bubbles and deflates the mixture, leaving it dense instead of light and airy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, coffee):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, coffee. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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