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Filtered Coffee
The French coffee biggin furnishes the easiest means for filtering coffee. It consists of two cylindrical tin vessels, one fitting into the other; the bottom of the upper one is a fine strainer, another coarser strainer is placed on this with a rod running upwards from its center; the finely ground coffee is put in, and then another strainer is slipped on the rod, over the coffee, the boiling water is poured on the upper sieve and falls in a shower upon the coffee, filtering through it to the coarse strainer at the bottom, which prevents the coffee from filling up the holes of the finer strainer below it. The coffee thus made is clear and pure.
The National Coffee-pot is so widely known as not to need description here, but the "gude wife" can improvise one equally as desirable and much simpler. Make a sack fine flannel, or canton flannel, as long as the coffee-pot is deep, and a little larger than the top; stich up the side seam to within an inch and a half of the top, bend a piece of small but rather stiff wire in a circle and slip it through a hem made around the top of the sack, bringing the ends together at the opening left at the top of the side seam. Having put the coffee in the sack, lower it into the coffee-pot with the ends of the wire next the handle, spread the ends of the wire apart slightly, and push it down over the top of the pot. The top of the sack will then be turned down a little over the outside of the pot, a part of it covering the "nose," and keeping in all the aroma, the elasticity of the wire causing it to close tight around the pot, holding the sack close to its sides. Instead of a wire (which must be removed to wash the sack after using), a tape may be used by tying the ends after turning the top of sack down. When the sack, with the coffee in it is in its place, pour the boiling water over the coffee, close the lid tightly, and let simmer (not boil) fifteen minutes to half an hour. In pouring for the table raise the sack off the nose but not out of the pot. This makes good coffee without eggs or any thing else to settle it.
This is less a formula than a description of two brewing devices, with one set of timings attached. The apparatus is easy to reproduce; the timing is the part to ignore.
- Do not simmer itFifteen minutes to half an hour of heat over the grounds will pull out bitter, astringent compounds and cook off the aromatics the author is trying to trap under the lid. A cloth-filter brew is finished in three to four minutes of contact with the water, and the pot should then be off the heat entirely.
- Water temperature"Boiling water poured on" is right in spirit but not literally: water off a full boil is around 212F, and coffee extracts best at 195-205F. Take the kettle off the heat and let it stand half a minute before pouring.
- No ratio is givenThe original assumes you know how much coffee your pot takes. Roughly 2 level tablespoons of ground coffee per 6 oz cup is the modern standard, and this method wants a medium-coarse grind, not the "finely ground" coffee specified for the biggin.
- The biggin's grindA biggin's fine strainer clogs with fine grounds, which is precisely why the recipe stacks a coarse strainer beneath it. If you are improvising with a metal mesh basket, a slightly coarser grind saves you the second screen.
- The flannel sackCanton flannel is a cotton flannel napped on one side; unbleached cotton flannel or a doubled piece of muslin does the same work. Wash any new cloth in plain hot water before first use to strip sizing, and never wash a brewing sack with soap afterward, since the nap holds detergent and the next pot will taste of it.
- Keeping the clothCoffee oils go rancid in a dried-out cloth filter. Rinse it thoroughly, then store it submerged in clean water in the refrigerator or frozen, and replace it when it stops smelling of nothing but coffee.
- "Without eggs to settle it"This is the selling point of the whole entry. Coffee of this period was commonly boiled with the grounds loose in the water and then cleared with a beaten egg or crushed shell, which drags the sediment down. Filtering makes the egg unnecessary.
- Wire and hemUse stainless or tinned steel wire, not galvanized; the hem should be wide enough to slide the wire out for washing, which the author notes but does not size.
The "biggin" is the ancestor of every drip pot: a two-chamber vessel in which water passes down through a bed of grounds instead of boiling in among them, and the name is traditionally traced to a late-eighteenth-century Englishman named Biggin, though the attribution is folklore rather than documented fact. By the 1870s the French drip pot and its American cousins — among them the "National" — were being sold hard to households that still made coffee by boiling grounds loose in a kettle and clearing the muddy result with a beaten egg. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by Ohio churchwomen in 1877, takes the practical line its readers would expect: describe the bought apparatus briefly, then explain how the "gude wife" can sew the same principle out of flannel, wire and a pot she already owns. Cloth was one common filter medium until paper drip filters were introduced by Melitta Bentz in Germany in 1908, and it survives today in Central and South American coffee socks and Japanese nel drip.