Coffee Ice Cream

History

In La Mejor Cocinera, coffee ice cream is one of the simplest entries in the frozen-dessert section: the printed recipe reads in full "Se hace café muy concentrado, se azucara y se pone a helar" — make very concentrated coffee, sweeten it, and set it to freeze. It is essentially a sweetened coffee ice, with no cream or egg. The book distinguishes it from a separate, richer "helado de café con leche," which is built on a custard base infused with roasted coffee beans — so within this book itself, "helado de café" is deliberately the plain, water-ice form. The book is an anonymous Spanish home-cookery compilation issued by the Madrid publishing house of Saturnino Calleja; the earliest firmly located edition is 1923. Its recipes are presented as practical, economical household cooking, but the text makes no claim about who ate this particular dish, and no source consulted attaches any social or class meaning to it. Coffee as an ice-cream flavor considerably predates this book: coffee was one of the three new beverages (with chocolate and tea) that entered seventeenth-century Europe and were first turned into unfrozen creams, and coffee ice creams are documented in eighteenth-century French confectionery (Emy). Beyond that documented flavor lineage, the historical record does not establish a specific origin, transmission route, or social history for this Spanish recipe.

Ingredients

• Coffee
• Sugar

Instructions

1. Prepare very concentrated coffee. Sweeten it with sugar. Freeze until solid.