Coffee
Take equal quantities of Mocha, Java, Laguayra and Rio coffee. Have the coffee roasted a chestnut brown. To every twelve cups of coffee to be drawn, use eighteen heaping tablespoons of the ground coffee. Have the water boiling hot, scald the biggin or percolator, put the ground coffee in the upper part, then pour on some boiling water for it to draw--about two teacups if you are to make twelve cups of coffee. Let it stand a few moments and pour again into the upper part of the percolator the first drawn coffee. Then add, one by one, the cups of boiling water required. It will take ten minutes for the coffee to be ready for the table.
Use the best white sugar, and in winter let the milk stand twenty-four hours for the cream to rise. Use together with rich cream, a cream jug of boiling sweet milk.--Mrs. M. C. C.
Coffee Buy Java and Laguayra mixed, two-thirds Java and one-third Laguayra, which will give a delightful aroma to the Java.
Scald the pot. Then put in a teacup of coarsely ground coffee, parched a light brown and mixed with cold water till it forms a paste, to six cups of boiling water. Before you put in the boiling water, add to the grounds one or more egg-shells or whites of eggs, to keep it clear. Let it boil ten or fifteen minutes. Before taking it off the fire, drop in about a teaspoonful of cold water, which will settle all the floating grounds.--Mrs.J. P.
Two methods from two contributors: a filter (biggin) recipe and a boiled-pot recipe with egg clarification. The blends are the part that has changed most.
- The blendMocha is Yemeni or Ethiopian coffee, Java is Indonesian, Rio is Brazilian, and "Laguayra" is Venezuelan coffee shipped from La Guaira. Any decent single-origin or house blend stands in; if you want the spirit of it, combine a bright Ethiopian with a heavier Sumatran or Brazilian.
- "Chestnut brown" and "light brown"Both refer to the colour of the roasted bean, and home roasting in a skillet or drum was still common, though packaged pre-roasted coffee was available by this date. Chestnut brown is roughly a modern medium roast, stopped shortly after first crack; the second recipe's "light brown" is lighter still. Neither is the dark oily roast sold as espresso.
- Cups and teacupsA nineteenth-century coffee cup runs about 5-6 fl oz rather than the 8 oz measuring cup, and a teacup is variously reckoned at between a half and three-quarters of a cup. Eighteen heaping tablespoons to twelve cups lands in the general range of modern filter strength, though how heaping the spoon is swings the result a good deal.
- The bigginA biggin is an early drip pot: a cloth or perforated metal basket sitting over the serving pot. A pour-over cone or a French press does the same work. Scalding it first is not fussiness -- a cold pot drops the brew water well below extraction temperature.
- Pouring the first draw back throughRecirculating the first extraction made sense when grinds were coarse and uneven, though how widely it was done is not documented. With a burr grinder and a modern filter it is unnecessary and risks pushing the brew towards bitterness. Pour in stages instead, wetting the bed first and waiting thirty seconds.
- Ten to fifteen minutes of boilingThe second method is boiled coffee, and it tastes like it: sustained boiling strips aromatics and pulls out harsh, papery bitterness. If you want to try the style, take it off the heat as it comes to a boil and let it steep off the fire.
- Egg shells and egg whiteThe egg proteins coagulate and trap suspended grounds and fines, dragging them down -- the same principle as clarifying stock or consomme. The splash of cold water at the end is the traditional trick for settling the floating layer, usually explained by the denser cold water sinking through it. Both are genuine practice and both are unnecessary with a filter.
- The creamLetting milk stand twenty-four hours for the cream to rise assumes raw, unhomogenized milk in a cold winter larder. Modern homogenized milk will never separate, and raw milk held at room temperature is not something to attempt; buy heavy cream and warm it, and scald the sweet milk for the second jug.
- YieldThe first recipe makes about twelve small cups, or roughly six modern mugs; the second about six small cups.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives (first published 1878), prints recipes over initials, which is why the same page carries two competing coffee doctrines side by side. The split between them is a long-running domestic argument: filtration, associated with French practice and with the biggin pot known in England from the late eighteenth century, against boiled coffee cleared with egg, the older Anglo-American method that survived in campfire and chuckwagon form well into the twentieth century. The named blend is a snapshot of the Atlantic trade -- Mocha and Java were the prestige coffees, Rio the cheap Brazilian bulk that came into American ports in quantity after mid-century, and La Guaira the Venezuelan middle ground. Green coffee roasted at home was still common in Southern kitchens, which is why both writers specify the colour of the roast before anything else.