Cafe Au Lait
1 cup German chiccory. 2 cups ground coffee.
Put in three pints boiling water with a pinch of isinglass, boil five minutes and allow it to settle, or, if made in a percolator it will be better. Use three-quarters of a cup boiling milk and one-quarter of strong coffee, with sugar to suit the taste.--Mrs. J. W. S.
This is a coffee concentrate plus a serving ratio, not a single cup. The proportions are extreme by modern standards, and one ingredient has effectively left the kitchen.
- The ratio is the pointThree-quarters boiling milk to one-quarter coffee is a much milkier drink than a modern cafe au lait, which is closer to 50/50. Because the coffee is a strong decoction, the result still tastes of coffee; if you brew at ordinary strength, shift toward half and half.
- Chicory, one part in three"German chiccory" is roasted, ground chicory root, sold today for coffee blending and in New Orleans-style tins. One cup chicory to two cups coffee is a heavy hand -- bitter, woody edge. A quarter to a third of that proportion suits modern palates better.
- IsinglassA clarifier made from sturgeon swim bladders, once used to drop grounds and fines to the bottom. It is largely a brewing and conservation material now. Omit it; a paper filter or a fine mesh does the same job. Egg or eggshell is also found in period instructions for settling boiled coffee.
- Do not boil it five minutesFive minutes at a rolling boil strips the aromatics and extracts harsh tannins. If you want the old decoction method, bring the water just off the boil, pour over the grounds, cover and steep four to five minutes, then strain.
- Strength and quantityThree pints of water to three cups of grounds gives a little under six cups of very strong coffee concentrate, and each serving uses only a quarter cup of it.
- The milkHer "boiling milk" means milk brought up on direct heat, which in practice gives scalded whole milk, often with a skin on top. If you scald rather than boil it, whisk or froth it and do not let it catch on the pan bottom, which is the usual fault with the direct method.
Chicory in coffee is generally traced to periods of scarcity and high duty -- the Continental blockade in France, and later the American South during and after the Civil War, when real coffee was expensive or unobtainable and roasted chicory root, sweet potato, rye and acorn all stood in for it. What began as adulteration became a taste, and by the later nineteenth century a cup with a third chicory could be preference rather than thrift, which may be why Mrs. J. W. S. lists it as an ingredient rather than an apology. The instruction to clarify with isinglass belongs to the same habit of treating coffee as a decoction to be boiled and settled; her note that a percolator would be better points toward the move away from boiled coffee.