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Coffee for One Hundred
Take five pounds roasted coffee, grind and mix with six eggs; make small muslin sacks, and in each place a pint of coffee, leaving room for it to swell; put five gallons boiling water in a large coffee urn or boiler having a faucet at the bottom; put in part of the sacks and boil two hours; five or ten minutes before serving raise the lid. and add one or two more sacks, and if you continue serving several times add fresh sacks at regular intervals, taking out from time to time those first put in and filling up with boiling water as needed. In this way the full strength of the coffee is secured and the fresh supplies impart that delicious flavor consequent on a few moments boiling.
To make coffee for twenty persons, use one and a half pints ground coffee and one gallon of water. -Mrs. C. S. Ogden.
A church-supper formula for brewing coffee by the gallon, written for an urn with a spigot rather than any modern machine. The proportions still work; the two-hour boil does not.
- The two-hour boilThis is the one instruction to disregard. Coffee extracts fully in four to six minutes at just under boiling; beyond that it pulls bitter phenolics and the aromatics cook off. The recipe half admits this by calling for fresh sacks near serving time to restore flavour.
- Why the eggsEgg mixed into the grounds is a clarifier. The protein coagulates in the hot water and traps fine particles, so the brew pours clear rather than silty. Shells were often used the same way. Six eggs to five pounds of coffee is a little over one egg per pound; the recipe does not say whether the shells went in, only that the eggs were mixed with the ground coffee.
- Muslin sacksThese are oversized tea bags. Unbleached muslin, cheesecloth doubled, or a nut-milk bag will do; the instruction to leave room for swelling matters, since wetted grounds swell and a tightly packed bag brews unevenly.
- QuantitiesFive pounds of ground coffee at roughly a pint per sack gives somewhere around a dozen to fifteen sacks, depending on grind. Five gallons is about 19 litres, or roughly 100 six-ounce cups, which is presumably where the title comes from.
- The working ratioThe smaller figure at the end is the useful one: one and a half pints of grounds to a gallon of water, which lands in the region of modern brewing strength or a little above it. Note that it does not tally with the five-pounds-to-five-gallons opening, which is stronger.
- The urnA "coffee urn or boiler having a faucet at the bottom" is a large hot-water vessel drawn from below, which is why the grounds are bagged rather than loose. A stockpot with a ladle works, or any modern urn used as a hot-water reservoir.
- HoldingCoffee kept at a simmer for a whole service goes flat and papery. Brewed coffee held in an insulated dispenser off the heat keeps far better than coffee held over a flame.
Egg-clarified boiled coffee was a common American method through the nineteenth century, long before drip filters were common: grounds went straight into the pot, and egg or shell was stirred in to settle them. Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) was compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from contributed receipts, and it is full of these mass-catering entries. The bagged-grounds method here is a practical refinement of the boiled pot, and the note about adding fresh sacks near serving shows that cooks already knew what long boiling did to the flavour, even if the urn kept boiling anyway.