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Percolated Coffee II
Put in upper part of percolator coffee pot 1 cup finely ground coffee. Pour in 3 pints boiling water and percolate about 10 minutes. Put Cream and Sugar in the cups. Pour in the coffee and serve. One-half cup cream left from making the parfait may be diluted with 1/2 cup milk and used for the coffee. CHICKEN AND CLAM BOUILLON WITH PIMIENTO CREAM Wash and scrub 2 quarts soft-shell clams in shell, put in kettle with 1 cup cold water, cover and cook till shells open. Strain liquor through double cheesecloth. Add enough Chicken stock, well seasoned, to make 1 quart. Add more Seasonings if needed and serve in bouillon cups with Pimiento cream. Clams may be used as steamed clams, if desired.
Two items run together here: coffee for the end of the meal and a clam-and-chicken bouillon to open it. Both are straightforward, but the proportions and the percolator method need translating.
- Coffee proportionsThree pints is 6 cups of water to 1 cup of ground coffee, a little stronger than the standard ratio used today. "Finely ground" is misleading for a percolator; use a coarse or medium-coarse grind, since fine grounds slip through the basket and cloud the pot.
- Ten minutes is a long percolationA percolator recirculates already-brewed coffee over the grounds, so extended cycling extracts bitter compounds and cooks off aromatics. Six to eight minutes from the first perk will give a cleaner cup, and the pot is better taken off the heat immediately rather than left to sit and keep warm.
- The parfait creamThe instruction assumes you have just made the parfait earlier in the menu and have cream left over. Half a cup of it let down with half a cup of milk gives roughly what we would call light cream.
- Soft-shell clamsThese are steamers, not the hard-shell quahogs or littlenecks most fish counters lead with. They are sandy by nature, so scrubbing is not enough; let them sit in cold salted water for an hour so they purge. Steamers gape naturally, so judge them by whether the neck twitches when touched, and discard any that do not react or that smell off.
- Straining the liquorDoubled cheesecloth is the point of the step. Even purged steamers throw grit, and a bouillon served clear in cups shows every particle. Pour off the liquor slowly and leave the last spoonful in the pot.
- Salt lastClam liquor is already saline and chicken stock usually is too, so the combined quart may need no salt at all. Taste after combining, and season with pepper, a little lemon or a dash of sherry before reaching for the salt cellar.
- Pimiento creamThe book gives no formula; in cookery of this period it usually means whipped cream folded with sieved or finely chopped canned pimiento, spooned on top of each cup. Canned pimientos are still sold in jars and are the right thing here; roasted red peppers are sweeter and wetter.
- YieldThe bouillon makes 1 quart, which is about four to six bouillon cups. The coffee is made from six cups of water, so a little under six cups poured.
This page comes from an entertaining manual built around complete menus rather than standalone dishes, which is why the coffee instructions cross-reference cream left over from a parfait made earlier in the same meal. The percolator was the dominant home coffee maker in the United States from the late nineteenth century until drip and electric methods displaced it, and its habit of boiling coffee repeatedly through the grounds is the reason percolator coffee acquired its reputation for bitterness. The bouillon belongs to a genre that hostess books of the period leaned on heavily: a clear, light first course served in two-handled cups, cheap to make from clam liquor and stock but presentable enough to open a company luncheon. Soft-shell clams, called steamers along the New England coast, were an ordinary and inexpensive shellfish then, and the frugal note that the clams themselves "may be used as steamed clams, if desired" is characteristic of a book written for households that cooked economically but entertained formally.