Skip to main content
Drink

Iced Coffee

A chilled coffee beverage made with ground mocha coffee, boiling water, sugar, and cream or cream and milk, cooled and frozen until pourable.

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

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 ↓

Iced Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Brew the coffee

  1. Heat a cafetiere in a pan of boiling water.

  2. Add coffee to the percolator and pour in boiling water.

  3. Let it stand for 10 minutes in the bain-marie.

Sweeten and freeze

  1. Stir in sugar and cream (or cream and milk) until combined.

  2. Let it cool, then freeze until just liquid enough to pour.

Serve

  1. Serve chilled on ice.

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. 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

Coffee
Provides the main coffee flavour and aroma of the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the drink softer when frozen.
Cream
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Freezing until just liquid enough to pour. Freezing fully makes the drink hard and icy, while stopping too early leaves it thin. Sugar and fat lower the freezing point, so the mixture stays partly liquid and forms a fine, scoopable slush when partly frozen.

“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.

You might also like

Brown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesEgg CoffeeEgg Coffee20 recipesCoffee MilkCoffee Milk12 recipesPostum CoffeePostum Coffee9 recipes