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CRUST COFFEE
Toast bread very brown, pour on boiling water, strain and add cream and sugar and nutmeg, if desired.
A sickroom drink rather than coffee in any real sense: browned bread infused in boiling water, strained, and lightly enriched. It works only if the toast is taken well past golden.
- The hinge is the toastThe recipe insists only that the bread be "very brown," and that is the whole of the method: the flavour comes from browning, so lightly toasted bread will give little more than cloudy, weak-tasting water. Take it dark, short of burnt.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Two thick slices of stale bread to a pint of boiling water is a workable ratio; steep covered 10 to 15 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve or cloth.
- Bread to useA plain, sturdy white loaf, preferably a day or two old. Enriched or sweetened sandwich bread browns unevenly and turns the infusion gummy, and seeded or sourdough loaves bring flavours the drink was never meant to have.
- Cream and sugarA tablespoon or two of cream per cup is enough to soften it; more and it reads as thin milk. Sugar to taste, and nutmeg grated fresh over the top rather than stirred in.
- Strain twice if serving to an invalidSediment settles fast but suspended crumb makes the drink unpleasant to sip. A second pass through a damp cloth gives a clear, tea-coloured liquid.
- YieldThe original specifies no quantity. At the ratio suggested above, about two cups, or one generous serving. It does not keep and should be made fresh each time.
Crust coffee belongs to a family of nineteenth-century "invalid drinks" that appear in many American household manuals of the period, alongside barley water, beef tea and toast water. These pages assumed a sick person could take almost nothing, and that whatever was offered must be warm, bland and free of stimulants; real coffee was often said to be too rousing for a fever patient. The name is honest about the deception: it is a coffee-coloured, faintly roasted-tasting substitute made from what the kitchen already had. Similar bread-based and grain-based imitations were also common in periods of scarcity and high coffee prices, most famously in the American South during the Civil War, when parched corn, rye, chicory and browned crusts all stood in for the imported bean. Buckeye Cookery places it in its "Food For The Sick" chapter, which reads today less as cooking than as domestic nursing.