Army Coffee
Coffee or tea may be made quickly by placing the required quantity of cold water in the pot, and adding the coffee, tied up in a sack of fine gauze, or piece of muslin; bring to boiling point, boil five minutes and serve. Make tea in the same way, except that the tea is put loose in the water, and simply allowed to boil up once.
A field method rather than a considered one: coffee grounds tied in cloth, dropped into cold water, and boiled. It works, but two of its instructions run against everything modern practice knows about extraction.
- No quantities givenThe original says only "the required quantity." Start at 2 tablespoons per 6 oz of water and adjust.
- Five minutes of boilingThis is the instruction that defines the drink and also spoils it. Coffee held at a rolling boil extracts harsh, bitter compounds and drives off the volatile aromatics; water just off the boil for four minutes gives the same strength without the scorch.
- The gauze sackAn improvised infusion bag, comparable to the coffee bags sold today. Use a doubled square of muslin or a large unbleached tea filter, tied loosely so the grounds can swell.
- GrindCloth is a coarse filter, so use a coarse grind. Fine grind will push silt through the weave and turn the cup muddy.
- The tea versionBoiling tea leaves, even briefly, pulls out tannin fast and leaves the cup astringent. Black tea wants water at a full boil poured over the leaves and steeped three to five minutes off the heat; green tea wants water around 175F.
- YieldScaled to a household pot, this makes whatever the pot holds; as written it is a batch method rather than a single serving.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s, barely a decade after the Civil War, and the name of this entry is doing the work of a recipe title: this is how coffee was made on campaign, where there were no filters and often no time. Union soldiers were issued green coffee beans to roast and crush themselves, and the boiled-in-the-pot method stayed in circulation for decades under names like army coffee, camp coffee, and later cowboy coffee. The muslin sack keeps the grounds out of the cup without any equipment beyond a scrap of cloth.