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Dessert

Coffee-ice

A chilled coffee custard dessert made with coffee, milk, sugar, egg yolks, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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-ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Roast the coffee until it is oily.

  2. Pour the coffee into 4 cups of warm milk.

  3. Add 12 ounces of sugar and cover the pot.

  4. Let the mixture cool nearly.

  5. In a bowl, combine 8 egg yolks with 4 cups of milk.

  6. Add the coffee mixture and strain through a sieve into a pot.

  7. Heat gently until it thickens, then cool it down.

Freeze and serve

  1. Pack a bucket with pounded ice and salt.

  2. Freeze the cream according to standard methods.

  3. Serve the ice on a napkin.

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

Coffee
Provides the main flavour of the ice cream once roasted and steeped in the milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour and becomes creamy when frozen.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point so the ice cream stays scoopable.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard through gentle heating and add richness and smoothness.

The step that matters

Heat gently until it thickens. Egg yolks set when heated, so high heat can scramble them and leave lumps. Gentle heat thickens the custard evenly and keeps it smooth.

“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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