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Dessert

Coffee Mousse

A chilled dessert made by folding coffee syrup into whipped cream and packing in ice and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Coffee Mousse

Ingredients

Directions

Make the components

  1. Whip the heavy cream until stiff.

  2. Cook the black coffee with sugar until it thickens into a syrup, then cool it.

Combine and freeze

  1. Fold the cooled coffee syrup into the whipped cream.

  2. Pack the mixture in ice and salt.

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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Heavy cream
Whipped into stiff foam, its trapped air gives the mousse its light, airy structure.
Black coffee
Cooked into the syrup, it supplies the coffee flavor and some bitterness to balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the coffee and, as it cooks, thickens into a syrup that adds body to the mousse.

The step that matters

Cool the coffee syrup fully before folding. Warm syrup would melt and deflate the whipped cream's air bubbles, leaving a dense, loose mousse instead of a light one.

“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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