Home › Beverages, Ices and Candies › Roasting Coffee
Roasting Coffee
Coffee when roasted, and especially when ground, loses its aroma.
If roasted too fast or too much, it is little better than so much charcoal. Hence it should be roasted in an implement made for the purpose, or else in a closed vessel slowly and with constant motion. If a little butter and sugar be beaten together and added to the coffee after it becomes hot, it will assist in holding the aroma, the essential part of coffee.
III. How to Make Tea.
THE old-fashioned rule, and a good one, is a heaping teaspoonful for each person and an extra one for the pot. For, unlike the Chinese, we drink tea strong, and with milk or sugar, or both. Tea should be made with soft water. Filtered rain-water is good. One way is to scald a metal teapot, put in the tea, pour in half the required quantity of boiling water, cover the pot with a "cosey," (a quilted cover to slip over the pot to keep it hot), and at the end of ten or fifteen minutes add the other half of the water. It is then ready to be poured into hot teacups. Serve by filling the cups half full. Then add more water to the pot and fill the cups, not too full.
Another way of making tea is to scald the pot, again fill it with boiling water, then put in the proper quantity of tea and let it stand, covered, until the leaves settle to the bottom of the pot, or about ten minutes.
IV. The Tea-Making of Various Peoples.
THE Chinaman puts his tea in a cup, and pours hot water upon it, and drinks the infusion of the leaves without addition. The Japanese triturates the leaves before putting them into the pot. In Morocco, they put green tea, a little tansy and a great deal of sugar in the teapot, and fill up with boiling water. In Bokhara, every man carries a small bag of tea about with him, a certain quantity of which he hands over to the booth-keeper whom he patronizes, who concocts the beverage for him. The Bokhariote tea-toper finds it as difficult to pass a tea-booth as our dram-drinker does to go by a whiskey-shop. His breakfast beverage is Schitschaj, that is, tea flavored with milk, cream or mutton fat, in which bread is soaked. During the daytime, sugarless green tea is drunk, with the accompaniment of cakes of fur and mutton suet. It is considered an inexcusable breach of manners to cool the hot cup of tea with the breath; but the difficulty is overcome by supporting the right elbow in the left hand and giving a circular movement to the cup. How long each kind of tea takes to draw is calculated to the second; and when the teapot is emptied it is passed round among the company for each tea-drinker to take up as many leaves as can be held between the thumb and finger-the leaves being esteemed by these people an especial dainty.
V. A Cup of Coffee.
SHERBADDIN, an old Arab author, asserts that the first man who drank coffee was a Mufti of Aden, who lived about A. D. 1500, or, as he puts it, in the ninth century of the Hegira. Even Arab authors should always leave room for a proviso. Perhaps some obscure person whose name has never come down to posterity, may have seen goats get "skittish" from eating the berries, as is related of a certain Dervish who is also credited with thus having discovered the virtue of cahui, as it was originally called. Coffee is good enough English, though an ex-alderman of Chicago is said to have spelled it without using a single correct letter, "kawphy."
He did, however, get in two letters of the original He spells the name of his adopted city name. "Shecawgow."
Two sets of working instructions here — home coffee roasting and pot tea — written when green coffee was a grocery staple and every kitchen had a roasting device. Both still work; the details have simply moved on.
- The hinge: slow and movingGreen coffee scorches at the surface long before the bean centre develops, which is why the text insists on constant motion in a closed vessel. A hot-air roaster, a drum roaster, or a heavy lidded pan stirred without pause gives the even result meant here; a still pan gives charcoal on one side and grass on the other.
- "Roasted too fast or too much"Modern practice puts a light-to-medium roast in the 8-12 minute range at bean temperatures of roughly 400-430F, ending shortly after the first crack. Beyond that the sugars carbonise and the aromatics the author is trying to preserve are burnt off.
- The butter and sugarGlazing hot beans with a little fat and sugar was done to seal the surface and slow staling — commercial roasters of the period glazed with sugar and egg for the same reason. It is no longer done: the coating can turn rancid and gum the burrs of a grinder. Airtight storage and grinding to order accomplish more.
- Coffee quantitiesThe passage gives none. A working figure is 2 tablespoons ground coffee (about 10 g) to 6 oz water.
- Tea ratio and yieldA heaping teaspoon per person plus one for the pot is generous by current taste — roughly 3 g per cup against the 2 g now usual. The two-stage filling described stretches one pot across two rounds of half-filled cups, so the strength evens out.
- Steeping timeTen to fifteen minutes will make almost any black tea harsh with tannin. Three to five minutes is the modern figure for black tea, two to three for green. The long times here suit the coarse, heavily oxidised leaf of the period, drunk with milk and sugar.
- "Soft water" and rain-waterThe point is real: hard water dulls tea and leaves a scum on the surface. Filtered water achieves what filtered rain-water did. Collected roof water is not drinkable today without treatment.
- A "cosey"A quilted cover slipped over the teapot. Any tea cosy or a folded towel does the same job of holding temperature through a long steep.
- The Moroccan versionDescribed, not prescribed — and worth leaving described. Tansy contains thujone and is not a safe kitchen herb. Mint is what Moroccan tea is actually made with; the tansy note may reflect a nineteenth-century traveller's confusion.
Home roasting was still common in 1900, though packaged pre-roasted coffee had already been taking a large share of the American market from the 1870s onward. Coffee reached the household as green beans, and the roasting fell to the cook, done in a hinged sheet-iron cylinder cranked over the range or a footed pan set in the oven. The advice to hold the aroma in with butter and sugar echoes the glazing that commercial roasters were then using for the same reason, before airtight tins made it unnecessary. The coffee-origin story attached here he gogoats, the goats, the dervish atheris traditional rather than documented, though the Yemeni Sufi connection is genuine enough: coffee is reliably attested in the Sufi houses of fifteenth-century Yemen before it spread to Cairo and Istanbul. "Cahui" is the author's rendering of Arabic qahwa, by way of Turkish kahve, which is where the English word comes from.