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Dessert

Coffee Cream

A custard made with milk or cream, coffee, powdered sugar, eggs, and egg white, boiled and set in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and coffee 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

Make the cream

  1. Boil the milk or cream in a saucepan for 15 minutes.

  2. Add the essence of coffee when the milk boils.

  3. Stir in the powdered sugar continuously.

  4. Remove the saucepan from the heat.

  5. Beat the yolks of the eggs and gradually pour them into the saucepan, stirring constantly.

  6. Return the saucepan to the heat until the cream begins to thicken.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a dish or custard cups and place them in a stewpan half full of boiling water.

  2. Let the water boil until the cream reaches the desired consistency.

  3. Allow it to cool before serving.

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. Milk + coffeetop 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

Milk or cream
Forms the rich liquid base that the custard sets in.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the cream as they set with gentle heat.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and dissolves smoothly into the hot liquid.
Essence of coffee
Provides the coffee flavour throughout the cream.

The step that matters

Adding the yolks to the hot milk. If hot liquid is poured into yolks quickly or the heat is too high, the eggs scramble. Adding them gradually while stirring constantly tempers the yolks so the cream thickens smoothly.

“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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