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Café Noir (After-Dinner Coffee)
To prepare after-dinner coffee, use twice the quantity of coffee or half the quantity of water, given in recipe for Boiled Coffee (see Page 30). This coffee may be prepared in the Percolator, following the directions given in the foregoing. Milk or cream is not served with black coffee. Serve in hot after-dinner coffee cups, with or without cut loaf sugar.
An instruction rather than a full recipe: it takes the book's boiled coffee and doubles its strength for the end of the meal. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- What the ratio actually isBoiled coffee of this period commonly ran in the neighbourhood of one tablespoon of ground coffee to a cup of water, though the book's own page 30 would have to be consulted to be sure. Doubling that gives roughly two tablespoons per 6 oz cup, which is a strong immersion brew by any standard.
- Grind matters more than the book saysBoiled coffee was made with a coarse or medium grind so the grounds would settle. Keep the grind coarse and lean on the ratio rather than on extraction time.
- PercolatorsThe percolator of this period is a stovetop pot that recirculates boiling water through the grounds. It over-extracts by modern standards. A French press or a strong drip brew at the doubled ratio gives much the same result with less scorching.
- Boiled means boiledBoiled coffee of this period was brought to an actual boil, and period recipes often used egg or eggshell to clarify it. Coffee held at a rolling boil turns harsh quickly; bring it just to the boil, pull it off, and let it settle.
- After-dinner cupsThese are demitasses, about 2 to 3 fluid ounces, roughly half the size of an ordinary coffee cup. Warm them first, since a small volume of coffee in a cold porcelain cup is lukewarm by the second sip.
- Cut loaf sugarLoaf sugar was originally a solid cone broken up into lumps, and by this book's day 'cut loaf' meant loaf sugar cut into small cubes. Ordinary sugar cubes serve the purpose.
- YieldFigure on about a quarter to a third of a cup per person, so a quart of brewed coffee will serve eight to ten demitasses.
Café noir is simply French for black coffee, and its appearance under a French name at the close of an American dinner is a small piece of social signalling. The formal dinner in middle-class households of this period was modelled loosely on French service, and the sequence of courses ending with a tiny cup of very strong unmilked coffee was part of that borrowing. The insistence that milk or cream is not served is the point of the entry: coffee with cream belonged to breakfast, coffee taken black and concentrated to the end of dinner. The technique behind it is older and plainer, boiled coffee having been the American standard for most of the nineteenth century, with the percolator arriving as the modern convenience this book is happy to recommend alongside the old method.