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Long before Four Loko became the official digestif of frat boys, or espresso martinis became the after-dinner choice for Manhattan hedge fund managers, Marcella Hazan was artfully bringing together booze and coffee as a gently caffeinated endcap to a good meal. In The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, her 1992 cookbook that was posthumously reissued this year for its 30th anniversary, Hazan plays with the combination in several dessert recipes that think outside the tiramisu box.
There’s the diplomatico, which layers together slices of rum- and espresso-soaked pound cake with a chocolate icing. There’s a semisweet chocolate mousse that’s jazzed up with hints of espresso and dark rum. There’s even a sweetened ricotta with rum and coffee that Hazan claims takes only 3 seconds to make in the blender.
But as someone who always has a bottle of scotch in the cabinet, Hazan’s “chimney sweep’s gelato” calls to me the most of the bunch. The dish is a three-ingredient balancing act of smoky (hence the name), toasty, cooling flavors—a wildly chic dessert to pull off at the end of a big lasagna party or Feast of the Seven Fishes, or to keep your New Year’s Eve going a little longer. It starts with a scoop of vanilla gelato (bonus points if it’s homemade, but a good vanilla ice cream from the grocery store also works), which is topped simply with a teaspoon of finely ground espresso and boosted with tablespoon of scotch, poured into the bowl to pool around the ice cream.
For Hallie Meyer, the owner of Manhattan’s Caffé Panna, which specializes in affogatos, the combination of ice cream and coffee is a no-brainer. “It’s just the best combination on the planet because the ice cream has all the qualities that the coffee doesn’t, and vice versa. Fat, cold, sugar, and cream is the opposite of acid, roasted, water, sharp,” she tells me. “So they kind of complement each other the way that red wine and steak do.”
The combination of scotch and coffee also makes perfect sense to Meyer, who has experimented with some amaro-topped affogatos, and affogatos that are sprinkled with finely ground espresso powder. “When you pair espresso—good espresso—with alcohol, what ends up happening is that you kind of dull the bitterness of both,” she says. By using dry, ground espresso, instead of brewed coffee, she explains, you get more of the coffee’s nutty, roasty scent, rather than the bitter, acidic notes.
“I think the two toppings work so incredibly well together because they have the neutral vanilla backbone to tame them,” says Patrick Miller, the owner of Faccia Brutto and former chef at Rucola in Brooklyn. Miller has made the chimney sweep’s gelato from Hazan’s book numerous times over the years, swapping in different scotches each time.
While there’s a world of potential experimentation within the trifecta of ice cream, alcohol, and coffee, part of the elegance of chimney sweep’s gelato is the brevity of its ingredient list. You could use the same beans you use for your morning pourover, but go for espresso if you want to achieve the extra-roasted quality that adds warmth to the dessert. Just be sure to give your guests ample warning about the caffeine (or opt for decaf for anyone with early bedtimes). And take some advice from Hazan, and use a high-speed blender to blitz it into a fine powder that will cover the scoop of ice cream like soot on a chimney.
