Iced Coffee
Follow directions for making Boiled Coffee, using four cups boiling water. Chill and serve in tall glasses filled with cracked ice; add cream and sugar.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's Boiled Coffee, the old egg-clarified pot method, and simply chilled it. Two things need attention -- the strength of the brew and how sugar behaves in a cold drink.
- Boiled coffee, in briefPeriod boiled coffee typically meant coarse-ground coffee mixed with a beaten egg (often with the crushed shell), combined with water, boiled and then left to settle off the heat until clear. The egg proteins coagulate and carry the fine sediment down, doing the work filter paper does now. A strong drip or French press brew stands in for it without loss.
- Brew it stronger than you want to drink itThe recipe specifies four cups of water but leaves the quantity of coffee to the parent recipe, and glasses filled with cracked ice will dilute the drink appreciably as they melt. Consider using more ground coffee for the same water, or chill the brew and pour it over ice at the last moment.
- Strain off the grounds before chillingCoffee left standing on its grounds keeps extracting and turns bitter and astringent as it cools. Decant into a jug the moment it has cleared, then refrigerate.
- Chill properlySeveral hours in the refrigerator, uncovered only until it stops steaming. Hot coffee poured straight over ice arrives watery and flat.
- Sugar will not dissolve in itSugar dissolves slowly in it -- Granulated sugar stirred into a cold glass tends to settle before it dissolves. Stir the sugar into the coffee while it is still hot, or keep a simple syrup on hand.
- Cracked ice, not cubesThe period ice was chipped from a block, giving irregular shards that pack a tall glass and chill fast. Coarsely crushed ice is the equivalent; it also melts faster, which is another reason for a strong brew.
- YieldFour cups of coffee fills three to four tall glasses once the ice and cream are accounted for.
Iced coffee turns up in American cookbooks from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, and its spread has a good deal to do with the ice trade: by the 1900s commercial ice is generally said to have become cheaper and more widely delivered, so a cold drink in July stopped being a luxury of the wealthy. Elizabeth O. Hiller's seasonal arrangement is the whole point of 52 Sunday Dinners, which organises a year of meals by season and leans on what the household already knew how to make -- hence the terse instruction to "follow directions for making Boiled Coffee." Boiled coffee cleared with egg was a common American method well into the twentieth century, before percolators and then drip filters displaced it; served cold with cream and cracked ice it was closer to what would now be called a coffee cooler than to modern cold brew, which is steeped cold from the start rather than boiled and chilled.