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Milk Coffee, or Cafe Au Lait
Cafe au lait--the favourite beverage at the breakfast-tables of our Continental neighbours-is the most simple of preparations, and yet is so badly made in most English households that it has become a national reproach. A very little care will enable the mistress of a family to have as good coffee on her table as can be procured in Paris. To have coffee in perfection it should be roasted and ground just before it is used; the former is not always practicable, but the grinding can easily be performed daily by the aid of a small handmill, which is an indispensable article in every kitchen. Do not use cheap coffee. Mocha is the best. No coffee-pot answers better than an earthenware coffee-pot with three strainers. Place the ground coffee under the top strainer, and above the two others; now replace the top one, and pour over quite boiling water in the proportion of three cupfuls of water to one cupful of the powder. When it bubbles up through the strainer, close the lid, and as soon as the whole of the water has passed through, the coffee is made. Boil the milk, and pour into the cups in the proportion of half coffee and half milk. Sweeten with crushed sugar-candy, or loaf sugar, as moist sugar destroys the delicate aroma of the coffee. Sufficient, an ounce of coffee to three-quarters of a pint of water. (See also COFFEE, BREAKFAST.)
This is a drip-pot method, written before paper filters, and it still works in any pour-over or French press with small adjustments. The two ratios given do not agree with each other, so decide which one you are following before you start.
- The two ratios conflictThree cups water to one cup of grounds is roughly 1:3 by volume and would produce something closer to concentrate than coffee. The closing line, an ounce of coffee to three-quarters of a pint of water, is about 28 g to 425 ml, which is a normal modern brewing strength. Use the second.
- Imperial measuresThree-quarters of an imperial pint is 15 fl oz, about 425 ml, not the 12 US fl oz the same words suggest today. A gill, if you meet it elsewhere in this book, is 5 fl oz.
- "Quite boiling water"Water straight off a rolling boil scorches the grounds and pulls out bitter compounds. Take the kettle off the heat and let it stand half a minute; 195-205F is the working range.
- The earthenware pot with three strainersThis is a biggin-type drip pot: grounds sit in a chamber between perforated plates and the water passes through once by gravity. A modern pour-over cone with a medium-coarse grind reproduces it almost exactly.
- MochaIn this period this meant coffee shipped through the Yemeni port of Mokha, not a chocolate drink and not the flavoured syrup sense. Any good single-origin bean answers the intent, which is simply: do not buy the cheapest tin.
- The sugarsSugar-candy is rock sugar, loaf sugar is hard refined sugar broken from a cone; either is plain sucrose. "Moist sugar" is the damp unrefined brown sugar of the period, and the objection to it is molasses flavour rather than sweetness.
- Boiling the milkMilk brought to a full boil catches on the pan and takes on a cooked note. Heat it to steaming, around 150-160F, and pour it hot so the half-and-half mixture arrives at drinking temperature.
- YieldAn ounce of coffee and 425 ml of water, cut half and half with milk, fills two to three large breakfast cups. Scale by the ounce per person.
Cassell's frames cafe au lait as a rebuke: the English, it says, have made bad coffee into a national reproach, while Continental households manage it every morning. That anxiety was common in Victorian cookery writing, when British coffee was often stale, adulterated with chicory and stewed on the hob, and tea had long since won the domestic argument. The remedy prescribed here -- grind daily, buy well, filter once through a drip pot -- is essentially the French method that spread with the biggin, a perforated-chamber pot whose name is traditionally said to come from a Mr Biggin, though the attribution is not firmly documented; the form was widely copied in earthenware and tin. The insistence on Mocha is a marker of the trade of the day, when Yemeni coffee shipped through the port of Mokha still carried the highest name, and the warning against moist sugar is a reminder that refined white sugar in hard loaves was a distinct and more expensive product than the damp brown sugar in most kitchen jars.