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Drink

Iced Coffee, with Cream

A chilled coffee mixed with cold cream and sweetened, served over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Iced Coffee, with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the coffee

  1. Prepare good coffee with water and let it cool.

  2. Mix the cooled coffee with the same volume of cold cream.

  3. Sweeten the mixture slightly more than to make it liquid.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into a packed ice-box with half the usual quantity of ice.

  2. Cover and keep it for 10 minutes.

  3. Disengage the parts adhering to the sides, cover the ice-box again.

  4. After 20 minutes, repeat the operation.

  5. After another 20 minutes, slightly work the preparation and pour it into cups or 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. 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 flavour and the bitter backbone of the drink.
Cold cream
Adds fat and richness, giving a smoother, creamier texture as it freezes.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping it softly textured rather than rock hard.

The step that matters

Sweeten slightly more than needed to make it liquid. Sugar lowers the freezing point of the mixture. Too little sugar lets it freeze into hard, icy solid; the extra sweetness keeps it scoopable and smooth when stirred during freezing.

“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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