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Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate to Toast Coffee
Wash and pick the coffee, put it in a very large stove-pan in a hot oven. Stir often, giving constant attention. It must be toasted the darkest brown, yet not one grain must be burned. It should never be glazed, as this destroys the aroma.
Two pints of coffee become three pints after toasting.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a home coffee-roasting method, written when green beans were the ordinary retail product and roasting was a weekly kitchen chore. It still works, with a few translations.
- "Coffee" means green beansThe subject throughout is raw, unroasted coffee, which is again easy to buy from specialty importers. Two pints is a reasonable single batch.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures. Read "hot" as the upper end of a modern oven; a cooler oven tends to bake the beans flat and papery rather than roast them.
- Stove-panA large shallow sheet-metal pan that sat in the oven of a wood or coal range. A heavy rimmed baking sheet is the equivalent; spread the beans in a single layer, no deeper than one bean, or the outsides scorch before the centers develop.
- "Stir often, giving constant attention"This is the hinge of the whole method. Beans go from evenly brown to burnt in under a minute at the end, so stir every two minutes and stay in the room. Expect 12 to 20 minutes total, with two audible rounds of cracking; darkest brown without burning means pulling shortly after the second crack begins.
- WashingPeriod recipes sometimes call for rinsing green coffee, presumably because beans arrived dusty from the sack. Modern green coffee is clean, and wet beans steam rather than roast at the start. Skip it, or dry them thoroughly first.
- Smoke and chaffRoasting throws off a great deal of smoke and papery silverskin, which will blow around the oven and set off an alarm. Run the extractor hard or work with a window open.
- CoolingThe original says nothing about cooling. Tip the beans into a colander immediately and toss them in the air to shed chaff and stop the roast; heat carried in the mass keeps cooking them.
- "Never glazed"Commercial roasters coated beans with egg white, sugar or gelatin to seal them for shipping. There is nothing to do here but agree with Mrs. S. T.
- Yield and restingThe two-pints-to-three expansion is plausible: beans swell substantially in volume while losing roughly 15 to 20 percent of their weight, mostly as moisture. Let roasted beans rest a day or so before grinding, as fresh roast off-gasses carbon dioxide, which can make for uneven extraction.
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, coffee reached most American households green, in the bean, and roasting it was a recurring domestic task ranked with baking bread. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathers such contributions from named Virginia housekeepers, and the pointed instruction that coffee "should never be glazed" places this one squarely in a live argument of the day: packaged pre-roasted coffee, most famously Arbuckle's Ariosa, was sold with an egg-and-sugar coating credited with sealing in freshness during shipment. Cooks who still roasted at home regarded the glaze as a cover for stale or inferior beans and a smotherer of aroma. The insistence on the darkest brown without a single burned grain reflects the real difficulty of the job in a wood-fired range, where oven heat was uneven and unmeasurable and the cook's only instruments were her nose and her eyes.