When a dessert is served after dinner, my usual first thought is, Yikes! More food! Unless its cherry pie or ice cream, I can usually skip dessert, but I do enjoy an occasional Irish coffee after a good dinner.
Though its simple to make properly, ordering Irish coffee at a restaurant is a crapshoot. Its hard to predict what youre going to get. Recently after dinner at an area restaurant which surely should have known better, ordering an Irish coffee brought about a cup of coffee in a glass mug with a big splash of Baileys Irish Cream dumped in, which isnt Irish coffee at all. Personally one sip of Baileys around Christmastime and Im good for the year. Its sort of like Nutella. Ive never understood the attraction.
But real Irish coffee, to me, is the perfect after-dinner dessert. Its a nice denouement after a meal, wrapping your hands around a mug of hot liquid with a little added punch. It helps the meal and the conversation to wind down on a pleasant note.
Happily enough, Irish coffee is indeed of Irish origin. Sometime just after World War II a chef in County Limerick added a splash of Irish whisky to mugs of coffee for newly arrived diners chilled from a cold flight aboard a plane, naming it Irish coffee on the spot.
For the record, heres how to make it:
Start with a cup of hot, freshly brewed, high-quality coffee. Add a teaspoon of sugar (often brown sugar) and an ounce of (usually Irish) whiskey. Stir well and add cream, which is where it gets interesting. You want the cream to float on top, and its not supposed to be whipped. You pour it slowly over the back of a spoon held just over the surface of the coffee. A lot depends on how well youve dissolved the sugar into the coffee as well as the freshness and consistency of the cream.
For me, I find it perfectly fine to whip the cream a little, just until it begins to thicken a bit. Squirting in some prewhipped cream from a can is not (sniff!) an acceptable substitute for doing it right.
The coffee is then sipped through the cream. It is one of the worlds great, quiet pleasures, beating the heck out of cocoa.
You can fuss all you want with the coffee end of it. I highly recommend you not use garden variety drip coffee grounds from the grocery store shelf. This is the time to get some good French or Italian roasted beans and grind them up yourself.
Make the coffee in a French press at least. If youre going to start with office break room Folgers, just skip it.
You can vary things as much as you want once youve tried the basic concoction. You may prefer sweetened whipped cream for the top or a sprinkling of nutmeg. Try it with white and brown sugar and vanilla sugar made by leaving a vanilla bean in a filled sugar bowl for several days. Experiment with any whiskey, bourbon or rye you enjoy, keeping in mind this is a dessert to be sipped slowly, and one is enough.
Irish coffee is generally served in a glass, as a glass mug or in a thick-walled, short-stemmed glass so you can see the layers and the slow-melting cream dissolving into the hot liquid. It will go well with your pumpkin pie this Thanksgiving for sure.
