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COFFEE (French method)
Pour a pint of boiling water upon two and a half ounces of freshly-ground coffee. Put the lid on the coffee-pot, and place it on the hob to simmer gently without boiling. Stir it occasionally, and at the end of two hours take it off the fire, and let it stand for a quarter of an hour to clear. Pour the coffee into the cups, and serve with milk and sugar. Probable cost, 2s. per pound. Sufficient, two and a half ounces for one pint of coffee.
The proportions here are sound by modern standards; the two-hour simmer is not. Everything else in this entry is period detail worth translating.
- Ignore the two hoursCoffee grounds give up their pleasant aromatics in the first few minutes and their bitter, astringent compounds thereafter. Two hours on the hob produces something closer to a tannic decoction than coffee. Four minutes of steeping in water just off the boil extracts the same grounds properly.
- The hobIn a Victorian kitchen the hob was the flat iron ledge at the side of the open range, warm but not directly over the fire. It is the equivalent of the lowest setting on a modern burner, or simply a warm spot off the heat, and the instruction "without boiling" is what it was for.
- The pintThe pint — An Imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml, not the American 16 oz. Two and a half ounces of coffee is roughly 70 g, which works out near 125 g per litre — about double the modern standard of 60 g per litre. The recipe directs it to be served with milk and sugar, so the strength was presumably meant to be softened in the cup.
- GrindNo grind is specified, but the method — loose grounds settling in the pot — requires a coarse grind. Anything fine enough for espresso will never clear and will pour through as sludge.
- ClearingThe quarter-hour standing period is the only filtration in this recipe; the grounds sink and the coffee is decanted off the top. Five minutes is enough with a coarse grind, and pouring slowly matters more than the wait.
- Cost noteCost note — "Probable cost, 2s. per pound" is the retail price of the beans, not of the pot of coffee. Cassell's gives such figures throughout, allowing a household to budget; at two shillings a pound coffee was a costly item against a labourer's wage.
- YieldOne Imperial pint of very strong coffee, which with the milk called for serves three to four cups.
By the late nineteenth century English cookery writers often used the label "French" for coffee methods that avoided a hard boil, in contrast to the domestic habit of boiling grounds in water and clearing the pot with eggshell or fish skin. French practice was associated with the percolator and the infusion pot, designed to hold water below boiling point, and the strong-brew-plus-hot-milk arrangement described here is the household ancestor of café au lait. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery gives several coffee entries side by side, and coffee-making does seem to have been unsettled in British kitchens: the drink had a reputation for being made badly in England, and much of the advice of the period is aimed at persuading cooks to stop boiling it. That this particular "French method" simmers for two hours suggests the lesson had only been half learned.