Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cafe Noir
Cafe Noir
This is the coffee which is handed round in small cups after dessert in France. It is sweetened, but neither milk nor cream is added. It should be made exceedingly strong, and will be found useful in warding off the somnolency which is often the first result of a good dinner. It should be made in the same way as break-fast coffee, allowing a cupful of freshly-ground coffee for every four cupfuls of boiling water. Probable cost, 4d. per cup. A small cupful will be sufficient for each person.
A ratio and a serving note rather than a method, since the book assumes you already make coffee daily. The one number that matters is the strength: one cupful of grounds to four of water.
- The ratio, in modern termsA cupful of ground coffee to four cupfuls of water works out at roughly 1 part coffee to 4 parts water by volume — noticeably stronger than ordinary drip coffee and closer to a concentrate; it is meant to be drunk in thimble quantities.
- "The same way as breakfast coffee"In Cassell's day that meant a percolator or a biggin — a two-chambered pot in which boiling water is poured over grounds held in a cloth or perforated strainer. A French press or an Aeropress gives the same infusion character; espresso equipment is not what is meant, though the intended result sits in the same territory.
- Boiling waterWater straight off the boil scalds the grounds and pulls out bitter compounds, which the very high dose here will amplify. Around 195–205F (90–96C) is the working range, so let a boiled kettle stand half a minute.
- Grind"Freshly-ground" is the operative word and the reason the instruction survives. For an infusion pot use a medium-coarse grind; at this dose a fine grind will clog a cloth filter and over-extract badly.
- The cupA "small cupful" for serving is the demitasse, roughly 2–3 fl oz (60–90 ml). The recipe uses "cupful" for both the grounds and the water without saying which size is meant; if the measure is an ordinary breakfast cup, four cupfuls of water will serve considerably more than four people at demitasse size.
- Sweetened, no milkSugar is part of the definition here, not an option — café noir is distinguished from café au lait by the absence of milk, not by being unsweetened. Add it to the cup rather than the pot so each drinker can judge against the strength.
- CostFourpence a cup was not trivial in the Victorian period; it marks this as an end-of-dinner luxury for a household with guests rather than an everyday drink.
Café noir — literally black coffee — entered English cookery books as a piece of French dinner-table procedure: the small strong cup taken after dessert, and never with milk, which was held to belong to breakfast. Cassell's frames it in the practical, slightly medicinal register the Victorians liked, as an antidote to the drowsiness following a long dinner, and the reasoning is sound enough: a demitasse of coffee at this concentration carries a substantial dose of caffeine. The entry is really about a rule of service — what is handed round, in what vessel, and at what point in the meal. That the compilers thought a ratio and a cup size worth printing says something about how firmly the shape of a formal dinner was apparently still being taught to English households of the period.