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Coffee-Roaster
How to Make Coffee. There are many ways of making it. It is brewed, boiled, filtered and generally baked, not roasted. Wehave shown that it should be roasted. Good coffee is made by taking freshly ground coffee (or if cold, warm the ground coffee), at the rate of four heaping tablespoonfuls for each three cups, on the principle of one for the pot. Scald the pot, put in the coffee, pour on boiling water, let it steep five minutes, strain, and then let it just boil up. If you have a filtering machine, patent digester, etc., use if you like.
When coffee is made it should be drunk at once. The cups should be hot, the cream thick, well stirred, and the sugar white. If you have bought whole coffee, of good quality; and if you have dried, roasted, and ground it yourself, there is no reason why you, the farmer's wife, with cream at home, should not have coffee of the best.
A farmhouse method for coffee, written when most households bought green beans and roasted them at home. The proportions still work; the final instruction does not.
- Skip the last boil"Let it just boil up" is the one step to ignore. Boiling drives off aromatics and extracts bitter compounds from grounds already fully steeped; the brew turns harsh and flat. Strain and serve.
- Water temperatureWater straight off a rolling boil is around 212F, hotter than the 195-205F usually recommended for brewing. Let the kettle stand a minute or so before pouring.
- The ratioFour heaping tablespoons per three cups is strong by modern habit but not extreme; depending on how heaped the spoon and how large the cup, it falls somewhere around 1:13 to 1:16 coffee to water by weight.
- "One for the pot"The old rule of an extra spoonful beyond what the cups require compensates for grounds that soak up water and never reach the cup. It is already folded into the four-spoon figure here.
- GrindFor a five-minute steep-and-strain, use a coarse grind, as for a French press. Fine espresso grind will over-extract in that time and slip through any ordinary strainer.
- Scald the potWorth doing. A cold pot pulls heat out of the brew water in the first seconds, and a five-minute steep has no time to recover.
- If you roast your ownFreshly roasted beans off-gas carbon dioxide, which makes the bed foam and brew unevenly. Rest them at least a day, often several, before grinding, and do not warm ground coffee as suggested here; warming only speeds up staling.
- YieldThe recipe gives no water volume. Reckoning the period coffee cup at about 6 oz, three cups is roughly 18 oz of water, or two modern mugs.
The insistence that coffee is "generally baked, not roasted" points at a real dispute of the period. Through the nineteenth century American households bought green coffee and roasted it themselves in a skillet, a covered pan or a hand-cranked drum set over the fire, and results ranged from pale and grassy to charred. Factory-roasted coffee in sealed paper packages, sold under brand names from the 1860s onward, took the job off the farm kitchen but was widely distrusted by cooks who suspected staleness, glazing with egg and sugar, or outright adulteration with chicory and roasted grain. The author sides with the home roaster, and the closing appeal to "you, the farmer's wife, with cream at home" is the argument in miniature: whole beans, your own roast, your own dairy, and no middleman between the crop and the cup.