Irish Coffee

The story

Irish coffee was born in 1943 at Foynes, a small flying-boat airport in County Limerick, where chef Joe Sheridan was receiving exhausted American passengers who had been forced to return to Irish soil after their flight across the Atlantic was called off because of bad weather. To warm and console them, Sheridan added a good measure of Irish whiskey and sugar to hot coffee, then carefully poured over the top a layer of thick, barely whipped cream that floats on the surface instead of sinking. When one passenger reportedly asked whether it was Brazilian coffee, Sheridan answered that it was "Irish coffee," and the name stuck. The recipe traveled to San Francisco in the 1950s, where it became a citywide sensation and spread from there across the United States, making it one of the few Irish specialties that won its fame in America and only then came back "home." On the holiday table it is served as a warm ending to dinner, somewhere between dessert and digestif.