There are very few people in the food world I admire as much as Julia Child. I went to culinary school and started a career in food because I loved cooking, but Julia made me understand that loving food could be much bigger than knowing how to cook. She shared her knowledge without arrogance, she never seemed to overthink anything, and, perhaps most importantly, she was completely uninterested in pretending that cooking always goes according to plan.
One of the things I’ve always admired most about Julia Child is that she never seemed particularly impressed by difficulty for difficulty’s sake. She could spend pages walking you through a proper French sauce when getting it right mattered, then happily take a shortcut when it didn’t. For all her formidable technique, she never confused effort with excellence—a philosophy I’ve come to appreciate more every year.
So, of course, I was delighted to learn that Julia’s go-to dinner party dessert was almost comically simple. It requires four ingredients, essentially no cooking, and roughly the amount of time I usually spend deciding whether or not I want dessert in the first place.
What was Julia Child’s go-to dessert?
In a 1990 interview with Cosmopolitan, Julia was asked to suggest a simple dinner party menu for four. After a very Julia lineup of artichoke bottoms with shrimp, chicken with red wine and onions, sauteed green beans and potatoes, she finished the meal with something easy: store-bought ice cream, bourbon, instant coffee and a cookie.
Child instructed readers to put a scoop of store-bought vanilla or coffee ice cream into a bowl or large glass, pour a little bourbon around it and dust the top with powdered instant coffee. If the coffee granules were too coarse, she suggested pulverizing them in a blender first. Then, she recommended simply serving a cookie alongside it.
I love that Julia didn’t even make a halfhearted attempt to dress up the convenience here. The ice cream is explicitly store-bought. The cookie is just a cookie. This is a woman who famously devoted hundreds of pages to teaching Americans the finer points of French cooking, and even she understood that you’ve already made dinner and perhaps that’s enough for one evening.
More importantly, the combination makes perfect sense. Bourbon brings its characteristic warmth along with vanilla, caramel and oak notes that play beautifully against sweet, creamy ice cream. Instant coffee adds a bitter, roasted edge that keeps the dessert from becoming cloying, while the cookie gives you a crisp texture contrast. It’s essentially a very sophisticated little sundae.
How to Make Julia Child’s 4-Ingredient Dessert
Lindsay Parrill For Taste Of Home
Julia called for bourbon, but I had a bottle of Ballotin Original Chocolate Whiskey on hand, so I used that instead. Bourbon is actually a type of whiskey with more specific rules governing how it’s made; Ballotin is a flavored whiskey, so mine brought an extra chocolate note to the party.
Lindsay Parrill For Taste Of Home
Making it is almost too simple. I added a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream to a glass, poured a small splash of whiskey around it and finished it with a light dusting of finely powdered instant espresso.
Then I tucked a crispy Milano cookie into the ice cream.
How does it taste?
Lindsay Parrill For Taste Of Home
This little treat is almost too good. The ice cream begins melting almost immediately where it meets the whiskey, creating a creamy, boozy little pool at the bottom of the glass. The coffee cuts through the sweetness, the whiskey makes the plain vanilla ice cream taste more interesting, and the wafer-like cookie is perfect for scooping up whatever is left behind.
It’s also exactly the sort of dessert I want after a dinner party. By the time I’ve planned a menu, cooked all day, served it and spent the evening making sure everyone has enough wine, my enthusiasm for producing one final culinary flourish has usually left the building. Julia Child understood that more than 35 years ago. Of course she did.
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Dining and Cooking