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Boiled Coffee
To one quart of boiling water (poured in after scalding the pot) stir in three gills of coffee, not ground too fine. Boil twenty minutes, scraping from the sides and stirring occasionally. Five minutes before breakfast, scrape from the spout, pour out half a teacupful, and return to the pot. Do this a second time. Set it with the side of the pot to the fire, so that it will be just at the boiling point. Do not let it boil, however. Serve in the same coffee-pot. Coffee should never be glazed.
Have a liberal supply of thick, sweet cream, also of boiled milk, to serve with the coffee.
If the members of the family drop in at intervals, it is well to keep the coffee over a round iron weight, heated just enough to keep the coffee hot, without boiling it. This answers better than a spirit lamp for keeping coffee hot.--Mrs. S. T.
A boiled-pot coffee from the era before drip filters and percolators were common in home kitchens. The proportions and the timing are both far outside modern practice, and the reason matters.
- Three gills is a lot of coffeeA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1½ cups of ground coffee to one quart of water. That is more than twice the modern ratio of about 2 tablespoons per 6 oz cup, and the recipe's insistence on a liberal supply of cream and boiled milk suggests a brew meant to be cut heavily at the table.
- Twenty minutes of boilingThis is the instruction modern practice has overturned outright. Sustained boiling drives off aromatics and pulls bitter, astringent compounds out of the grounds. Coffee brewed by any method is best held between about 195 and 205F and never allowed to boil, which is exactly the point the recipe itself makes for the final holding stage.
- Grind"Not ground too fine" means coarse, as for a French press. Fine grounds in an unfiltered pot will not settle and end up in the cup, and they over-extract badly over twenty minutes.
- Pouring out and returning a half teacupfulThis clears the spout and mixes the brew, and is done twice. Egg or crushed eggshell was a common alternative for clearing boiled coffee in cookbooks of the period; this recipe does not use it.
- "Coffee should never be glazed"Glazing was a commercial roasting practice of coating beans with egg white, gelatin, sugar or similar to seal them and improve appearance. It was widely suspected at the time of masking stale or inferior coffee. It is not something you will encounter today.
- The iron weightThe heated "round iron weight" set under the pot acted as a low, even heat sink. A modern equivalent is a thermal carafe or a warming plate set low; a burner may be difficult to hold below a boil.
- YieldOne quart of very strong brew, intended to serve four to six cups once cream and boiled milk are added.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, generally dated to 1877 though imprints of 1878 and 1879 also circulate, was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, and credits recipes to their donors by initials or married name, as here with "Mrs. S. T.", putting them in print without full exposure. Boiled coffee was the dominant American household method through most of the nineteenth century: grounds and water together in a tin or enamelled pot, the grounds settled rather than filtered, and the whole thing brought to the table in the same vessel it was made in. The insistence on a liberal supply of thick cream and boiled milk is a reminder of how strong and how bitter that brew was, and the note about family members dropping in at intervals may suggest a breakfast table that stayed set for an hour or more, though that is inference rather than something the book states. Coffee's presence at all is worth noting in a Virginia book of this date: wartime blockade had forced substitutes of parched rye, corn and chicory on Southern households a decade earlier, and it is tempting, if speculative, to read real coffee, generously used, as a small statement of restored plenty.