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Coffee Made with Cold Water
Put the coffee into the coffee pot with the white or the clean shell of an egg. Cover with cold water and allow it to come to a boil. Pour on the required amount of boiling water for the desired number of cups and add two tablespoons of cold water. Allow to stand three or four minutes to settle.
This is boiled coffee, the standard American method before drip and percolators took over, and the whole point is the egg, which drags the grounds into a raft so the brew pours clear. Estes gives no proportions, so the ratio is yours to set.
- ProportionsThe original assumes you know how much coffee to use. A workable modern ratio for this style is 2 level tablespoons of coarsely ground coffee per 6-ounce cup; the recipe has the grounds simply covered with cold water before the pot goes on the heat.
- What the egg doesEgg white, or the membrane clinging to a rinsed shell, coagulates as the pot heats and traps the fine particles and some of the bitter colloids. One white, or the shell of one egg well crushed, is enough for a pot of six to eight cups. It is a clarifying agent, not a flavoring.
- "Come to a boil" is literal but briefThe grounds and cold water are brought just to the boil and no further. Prolonged boiling is generally held to drive off volatile aromatics and pull out harsher, more bitter compounds.
- The two tablespoons of cold waterThe traditional explanation is that the cold splash cools the surface and helps the floating grounds settle to the bottom of the pot.
- Grind matters more than it didGrind -- A coarse grind, like French press, suits this method; a fine drip or espresso grind is more likely to slip past the egg raft and stay suspended in the cup.
- The potCoffee pots of the period were often tall enamelled or tin vessels. Any tall saucepan works, but pour slowly and through a fine strainer, and stop before the bottom inch.
- Settling timeThree or four minutes standing, as the recipe says. Coffee left sitting hot on the stove afterwards is generally reckoned to go flat and stale-tasting however well it was brewed.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Palace Car Company, serving railroad passengers and, by his own account, figures including Grover Cleveland and Stanford White. Egg-clarified boiled coffee of this kind was the American norm for most of the nineteenth century and was often called "egg coffee" or, in Scandinavian-American communities where it persisted longest, kokkaffe; it appears in cookbooks from Lydia Maria Child onward. The title here is slightly misleading to modern eyes: the coffee is not cold-brewed but started in cold water, a practice held to give a fuller extraction than dumping grounds into water already boiling. Estes was writing at the moment this method began to lose ground to the percolator, and a recipe like this one records a technique that was on its way out of ordinary kitchens.