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WARMED-OVER COFFEE
Save all that is left each meal, drain it off into a jar or earthen vessel, and when there is enough for a single meal, turn it into the coffee pot, beat an egg thoroughly and stir well into it on the stove, and let it just come to boiling, then take it off, pour in half a tea-cup of cold water, and if your coffee was good when first made, it will be just as good the second time.
When a large quantity of coffee has been made for a party, the grounds should be drained and put away in a stone jar; make coffee as usual except using double the quantity. It will keep good for weeks.
This is thrift writing rather than cooking: a method for salvaging leftover coffee and, in the second half, for stretching used grounds. The first part works better than a modern cook expects; the second should be ignored.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe instruction is to bring it just to boiling and pull it off. Reheated coffee turns bitter and flat once it actually boils, because the aromatic oils drive off and dissolved acids continue to break down. Warm it to about 160-170F and serve immediately.
- What the egg is doingBeaten egg stirred into hot coffee is a clarifying agent. The protein coagulates as it heats and traps suspended fine grounds and colloidal solids, pulling them out of the liquid so the reheated cup is clear rather than muddy. It is the same principle as egg-raft consommé, not an enrichment.
- Egg quantityOne whole egg is a great deal for a single meal's worth of leftover coffee. Many period cookbooks use only the shell and a little white for the same purpose, which is gentler; a whole egg in a pint or so will noticeably thicken and cloud the cup if it sets before it can be strained off.
- "Coffee pot" hereIn 1877 this would typically be a tin or granite-ware pot set directly on the stove; many such pots had no filter or basket, which is why clarifying and settling mattered. Note that the coffee in this recipe has already been drained off the grounds. In a modern kitchen do the reheating in a small saucepan and strain.
- The half tea-cup of cold waterTea-cup measures in books of this period are usually reckoned at around three-quarters of a cup, so half a tea-cup is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup. The cold water is chiefly a settling trick: it drops the temperature and helps the coagulated egg and any fines sink so the coffee can be poured off clear. It will also dilute the cup by that much.
- Skip the stored grounds entirelyWet spent grounds held in a stone jar for weeks at room temperature will grow mould and go rancid. There is also very little left in them to extract; the second pass gives colour and bitterness more than coffee. Use fresh grounds.
- Storing the leftover coffee itselfThe recipe gives no storage time; it assumes coffee is saved from meal to meal until there is enough for one serving. Brewed coffee held covered in the refrigerator for up to two days is the modern equivalent.
- YieldWhatever you have saved, less the settled sediment, plus the half tea-cup of water (about 1/3 to 1/2 cup). The recipe states no yield.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled from the contributions of Ohio housewives, is organised around the idea that nothing leaves a kitchen unused, and this entry sits in that tradition: coffee was an imported cash purchase, bought green or freshly roasted by the pound, and throwing away half a pot was throwing away money. Egg-clarified coffee is often said to have been common in nineteenth-century America, where boiled coffee made in an open pot left grounds and fines in suspension; the egg, or often just a crushed shell, was the household filter before paper cones existed. The second half of the entry — save the grounds from a party to brew again at double strength — belongs to the same economy that produced chicory, roasted rye and parched-corn "coffees," all of which appear in books of this period whenever the real article was dear.