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Dripped or Filtered Coffee
If one quart of coffee is desired, grind three gills of coffee, put it in the filterer and pour boiling water over it. If not sufficiently strong, pour out and return to the filterer. Then set on the fire and boil up, taking from the fire immediately.--Mrs. S.T.
A drip-pot method from the era of the tin biggin, with one instruction no modern cook should follow.
- Three gills of ground coffeeA gill is half a cup, so this is 1 1/2 cups of grounds to a quart of water — roughly double the strength of standard modern brewing. Cut to about 3/4 cup (2 to 2 1/4 oz by weight) per quart unless you want something closer to the strong, sweetened, milk-cut coffee of the period.
- The "filterer"This means a two-chamber drip pot, the biggin or French filter, where the grounds sit in a perforated upper basket and hot water passes through. Any pour-over cone, Chemex or Melitta does much the same job; one difference is that the old pots kept the brew hot over the fire.
- Skip the boilThe final direction — set on the fire and boil up — is the one step to ignore. Boiling drives off the aromatic oils and pulls out bitter compounds; brewed coffee should never exceed about 200F, and reheating past that turns it harsh and flat. The recipe does not say why the boil was wanted.
- Water temperatureWater straight off a full boil is hotter than ideal for brewing. Let the kettle stand a minute or so, to around 200F, before pouring.
- Re-pouring for strengthPassing the same liquid through the same bed a second time, as directed, will pull out more, but an increasing share of it is bitter. If the brew is weak, use more grounds or a finer grind next time rather than recirculating.
- GrindOld hand mills produced a coarse, uneven grind suited to a slow-dripping metal basket. For a paper cone use a medium grind; for a metal filter, medium-coarse.
- YieldOne quart, about four 8-oz cups.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why this entry ends with the initials of its donor rather than a house style. Filtered coffee was still something of a refinement in American households of the 1870s: the older practice was to boil grounds directly in the pot and settle them with eggshell or cold water, and drip pots — the biggin conventionally associated with the Englishman George Biggin in the 1780s, and the French filter pot usually credited to de Belloy around 1800 — were promoted through the century as the way to get coffee without the bitterness of boiling. Mrs. S.T.'s instruction to bring the filtered coffee to a boil at the end shows how stubbornly that older habit hung on, even in a recipe whose whole point was to avoid it.