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Steamed Coffee
Put coffee into the pot, pour the boiling water on it; place this pot (which is made to fit) into the top of the tea-kettle, and let cook from ten to twenty minutes, while water in kettle is kept. boiling all the time. This makes a clear, delicious coffee. Some persons hold that by first wetting the coffee with cold water, bringing it to boiling point, and then pouring in water, more of the strength is extracted.
This is a double-boiler method: the coffee never touches direct heat, only the steam and boiling water of the kettle beneath it. The book assumes you own a nesting pot for the purpose; a heatproof bowl or small saucepan set over a pan of boiling water does the same job.
- Quantity, since none is givenNineteenth-century coffee directions commonly run to roughly a heaping tablespoon of ground coffee per cup of water. Start at one tablespoon (about 7 g) per 6 oz cup.
- The pot "made to fit"Nineteenth-century kitchens sold coffee pots sized to seat inside the mouth of a tea-kettle. Any bowl or pan that sits over simmering water without touching it works, covered, so the aroma is not lost.
- GrindUse a coarse grind, as for a French press. Fine espresso grind steeped this long turns harsh and will be impossible to strain cleanly.
- Ten to twenty minutes is too longExtraction of the pleasant compounds is largely finished in four to six minutes; beyond that you get mostly bitterness. The gentle steam heat forgives more than boiling does, but ten minutes is the outside limit and twenty will taste stewed.
- Why "clear"Clarity here comes from never letting the brew boil and roil the grounds, plus letting the pot stand a moment before pouring. A paper or fine mesh filter over the cup gets you further than any amount of settling.
- The cold-water variantThe second method described is essentially a cold bloom: wetting the grounds and bringing them slowly to temperature does wet the coffee more evenly. It also risks a boil, which is the one thing this method exists to avoid.
- WaterFill the kettle well and check it partway through. A kettle boiled dry under a nested pot scorches the coffee and can crack the vessel.
Buckeye Cookery belongs to the era when most American coffee was boiled outright — grounds thrown into water, hammered at a rolling boil, then cleared with an eggshell, a beaten egg, or a splash of cold water to drag the grounds down. Steamed or "steeped" coffee was the refined alternative, favored by writers who had noticed that boiling coffee makes it bitter. The disagreement recorded in the last sentence — whether to wet the grounds first with cold water — appears to reflect a question that divided cooks of the period.