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Dessert

Creme Au Cafe. — Coffee Cream.

A custard-like coffee cream made with milk, burnt and ground coffee, lemon peel, sugar, eggs, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Creme Au Cafe. — Coffee Cream.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

  1. Boil the milk for about 25 minutes with burnt coffee, ground coffee, and lemon peel.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Make the cream

  1. Add powdered sugar, egg yolks, egg whites, and cream, and mix well.

  2. Pour the mixture into a serving dish.

  3. Place it in a stewpan with hot water.

Finish and serve

  1. Glaze the top with sugar.

  2. Use a salamander to caramelize.

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

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

  2. Milk + coffeetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Coffee + sugartop 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the coffee flavour and becomes the body of the cream.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they set and add richness to the cream.
Egg whites
Add structure and help the cream set with a light texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the cream and dissolves easily into the liquid base.
Burnt coffee
Adds a deep, roasted bitter aroma to the cream.

The step that matters

Place it in a stewpan with hot water. Setting this egg-based custard in a gentle hot-water bath keeps the heat even and mild, so the eggs thicken smoothly instead of curdling or turning grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, coffee, sugar, egg, cream. 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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