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COFFEE SYRUP
Take half a pound of the best ground coffee; put it into a sauce-pan containing three pints of water, and boil it down to one pint: boil the liquor, put it into another sauce-pan, well scoured, and boil it again. As it boils add white sugar enough to give the consistency of syrup; take it from the fire, and when it is cool put in a bottle and seal. When traveling, if you wish for a cup of good coffee put two tea-spoons of the syrup into an ordinary cup, and pour boiling water upon it, and it is ready to use.
A coffee concentrate meant for the road, made by reducing a very strong brew and preserving it with sugar. The whole thing hinges on how far you take the reduction and how much sugar goes in.
- Proportions in modern termsHalf a pound of ground coffee is about 225 g, or roughly two to two and a half cups of medium grind; three pints is 6 cups of water, boiled down to 2 cups. That is an extraction ratio far stronger than any drinking coffee.
- "Boil the liquor" means strain first"Boil the liquor" probably implies decanting -- the instruction to put it into a second, well-scoured pan reads as a transfer that leaves the grounds behind, though the recipe never says so. Pouring through a fine sieve or a coffee filter at this stage will keep the syrup from being gritty or throwing sediment in the bottle.
- How much sugar"Enough to give the consistency of syrup" is not quantified; a heavy syrup would take something in the order of 2 cups of sugar to the pint of reduced coffee. Less sugar gives a thinner syrup, which is likely to keep less well.
- Boiling is what the recipe intends, and what it costsProlonged boiling drives off the aromatic compounds and pushes the brew towards bitterness, so the result is dark and flat rather than fragrant. Reducing at a bare simmer, uncovered, loses less.
- Keeping itA sugar-heavy syrup in a clean sealed bottle is reasonably stable, but this is not a canning procedure and there is no acid in it. Refrigerate and use within a few weeks; discard if it smells fermented or shows any film.
- Yield and dosingRather more than a pint of syrup once the sugar is dissolved, which at two teaspoons per cup gives fifty or more cups. Two teaspoons is a modest dose by current tastes; a tablespoon makes a stronger cup, already sweetened.
- Scouring the second panThe emphasis on a well-scoured saucepan may not be mere fussiness; tinned copper and cast iron of the period could hold flavours from earlier cooking, and modern stainless or enamelled steel avoids the question. The recipe itself gives no reason.
Portable coffee essences were a staple of nineteenth-century travel and camp cookery, when a hotel or railway stop could rarely be trusted for a decent cup. Reducing brewed coffee and loading it with sugar produced something that could travel in a corked bottle, and commercial coffee-and-chicory essences on the same principle, the Scottish ones best known, were on sale in the later nineteenth century, though their founding dates are variously reported. Buckeye Cookery (1877) grew out of an Ohio church-community cookbook, and is full of this practical, mobile domesticity: things to carry, things to keep, things to make once and draw on later. The same idea survives in sweetened coffee syrup, most visibly in Rhode Island, where coffee milk is generally traced to Italian-American shops in the early twentieth century rather than to household recipes like this one.