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Dessert

White Coffee Cream

A chilled coffee-flavored custard made with cream, burnt coffee, egg whites, and sugar.

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 ↓

White Coffee Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the cream and keep it hot on the side of the furnace.

  2. Add the burnt coffee, cover, and let it infuse for 2 hours.

  3. Beat the egg whites lightly.

  4. Strain the coffee mixture and mix it with the egg whites.

  5. Add the sugar and thicken on a very slow fire.

  6. Strain again and chill 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Cream + coffeetop 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).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Cream
Forms the rich body of the dessert and carries the coffee flavour.
Burnt coffee
Gives the cream its strong coffee aroma and flavour as it infuses.
Egg whites
Help the mixture thicken and set as it gently heats.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the bitterness of the coffee.

The step that matters

Thicken on a very slow fire. Egg whites can curdle or turn grainy if heated too quickly. Gentle, slow heat lets them thicken smoothly into a cream.

“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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