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Coffee, Breakfast
Coffee is best when made in china or porcelain cafetieres. Take freshly roasted berries, grind them at the last moment, place the powder upon the perforated bottom of the upper compartment, put the strainer on it, and pour boiling water in gradually. Coffee thus made will be clear, bright, and full of flavour. When a cafetiere cannot be had, proceed as follows. Fit a small muslin bag inside the top of the coffee-pot. Pour a little boiling water through this, and, when the pot is hot, pour it off, and put the coffee into the bag. Pour boiling water gradually over it, and when it is all drained through remove the bag and send the liquid to table. It should be remembered that the water must be poured on a little at a time, or the strength of the powder will not be thoroughly extracted. When it can be done, coffee should be sent to table in the same pot in which it was made, as this will prevent its getting cool; and coffee for breakfast is nothing to speak of if it is not hot. Time, two or three minutes. Probable cost, Mocha coffee, 2s. per pound. Sufficient, allow a heaped table-spoonful of freshly-ground coffee for every breakfast-cupful of boiling water.
This is a drip method, not a plunger method, and the one instruction that carries the whole thing is the slow pour: water added a little at a time keeps the bed of grounds saturated and extracting rather than flooding straight through.
- "Cafetiere" does not mean French pressIn Victorian English usage a cafetiere was a two-chamber drip pot: coffee sits on a perforated plate in the upper section and the brew falls into the pot below. Any pour-over cone or filter holder does the same job; a plunger pot does not, since it steeps rather than filters.
- The muslin bag alternativeCloth filtering of this kind anticipates the later paper filter, and an unbleached cloth filter or a paper cone gives the same result with less fuss. Rinsing and preheating with boiling water, as directed, is still worth doing -- it warms the pot and rinses any papery taste from a filter.
- Water temperatureThe recipe calls for boiling water throughout. Modern filter practice generally prefers water just off the boil, around 200F/93C, on the view that fully boiling water accentuates bitterness; letting the kettle stand half a minute is a departure from the original rather than an interpretation of it.
- A breakfast-cupfulA Victorian breakfast cup is large, perhaps 8 to 10 fl oz, considerably more than a teacup. A heaped tablespoon is roughly 10-12 g of ground coffee, which works out somewhat weaker than the modern filter ratio of 60 g per litre.
- GrindThe instruction to grind at the last moment is the most durable advice on the page. For drip through cloth or paper use a medium grind, about the texture of coarse sand; too fine and the slow pour will stall.
- Two or three minutesThat is the drawdown time for a small potful, and it still holds. If the water is passing through much faster the grind is too coarse; much slower and it is too fine.
- Mocha coffeeThen a specific origin — beans shipped through the Yemeni port — now more often a name for a chocolate-flavoured drink. Any single-origin or blend labelled for filter brewing will suit; nothing in the method depends on the bean.
- Serving hotThe advice to send it to table in the brewing pot assumes a china pot that has been preheated. A vacuum flask or a warmed carafe does the job better, but do not keep coffee on a hotplate, which stews it within minutes.
Cassell's is writing at a period when filtration was gaining ground on boiling in English kitchens, though boiled coffee persisted alongside it. Earlier nineteenth-century books routinely told cooks to boil the grounds and clear the pot with an eggshell or a little isinglass; the drip cafetiere, generally traced to French designs of the early 1800s, produced the "clear, bright" cup this entry praises without any such clarifying. The insistence on freshly roasted, freshly ground beans reflects a period when coffee was often bought green or in bean and roasted at home or by the grocer, and when ground coffee was frequently adulterated or extended with chicory -- permissible in Britain where declared, and one reason some households ground their own. The closing remark that breakfast coffee "is nothing to speak of if it is not hot" suits a book addressed to households with servants, where the kitchen might be some distance from the breakfast room.