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Boiled Coffee
1 cup medium ground coffee.
White 1 egg. 6 cups boiling water. 1 cup cold water.
PROCESS: Scald a granite-ware coffeepot. Beat egg slightly and dilute with one-half cup cold water, add to coffee and mix thoroughly. Turn into coffeepot and add boiling water, stir well. Place on range; let boil five minutes. If not boiled sufficiently, coffee will not be clear; if boiled too long, the tannic acid will be extracted, causing serious gastric trouble. Stuff the spout of pot with soft paper to prevent the escape of aroma. Stir down, pour off one cup to clear the spout of grounds, return to pot. Add remaining half-cup cold water to complete the clearing process. Place pot on back of range for ten minutes, where coffee will not boil. Serve immediately. If coffee must be kept longer, drain from the grounds and keep just below boiling point.
Egg-cleared boiled coffee is a real technique, not a curiosity, and it works if you respect the timing. The five minutes of boiling is the whole recipe: less and the grounds stay suspended, more and you cook out the bitterness the egg cannot mask.
- Strength and grindOne cup of grounds to six cups of water is a 1:6 ratio by volume, which works out close to the modern standard of about two tablespoons per six ounces, so this is a full-strength but not extreme brew. "Medium ground" here probably means something nearer what we would call coarse; anything fine is likely to slip past the egg raft and into the cup.
- Granite-wareGranite-ware or agate-ware is enamel-coated steel, the standard cheap pot of the period. Any non-reactive pot with a lid works; scalding it first is simply pre-heating so the boiling water is not knocked off temperature.
- What the egg doesEgg white coagulates as it heats and traps the fine particles and some of the astringent compounds, dragging them into a raft that settles with the grounds. The result is unusually clear, mellow coffee. The white is fully cooked by five minutes at a boil.
- The tannic acid claimOver-boiled coffee tastes harsh and bitter because prolonged high heat extracts the wrong compounds, but it does not cause "serious gastric trouble." The period's fear of tannin was widespread and overstated; treat the warning as a flavour instruction.
- Skip the paper in the spoutStuffing the spout with soft paper to hold in the aroma is best ignored: paper of unknown make is not something you want in contact with hot coffee, and it accomplishes nothing a lid does not.
- The cold-water finishThe final half cup of cold water drops the temperature and helps the raft and grounds sink. The ten minutes off the boil is then the settling period, not idle time.
- Holding itIf you must keep it, get it off the grounds first, exactly as written. Coffee left sitting on spent grounds keeps extracting and turns bitter within minutes.
- YieldAbout six cups. Serve at once; boiled coffee does not improve with reheating.
Clarifying coffee with egg white belongs to the era before the paper filter and the electric percolator, when much American coffee was boiled in an open pot and the problem was not extraction but grounds in the cup. Egg (sometimes the crushed shell as well) was a common household remedy, and the technique survives most visibly as Scandinavian-American "egg coffee," still made in Lutheran church kitchens across the upper Midwest. Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) is a menu book rather than a collection of novelties, and coffee accordingly gets a full, exacting procedure. The anxious note about tannic acid reflects a genuine preoccupation of Progressive-era domestic science, which treated coffee as borderline medicinal and worried publicly about its effects on digestion and the nerves.