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After-dinner Coffee
1 egg slightly beaten 4 cups boiling water 1/2 ounce chicory 1 cup cold water Mix coffee, chicory, egg and cold water, add boiling water, and boil five minutes; let stand five minutes on back of range where it will keep hot. Serve without sugar or cream.
These same ingredients may be used in the French coffee pot, and the liquid may be poured through the coffee until the required strength is obtained. 1 pint claret 1 cup curaçoa 1 cup soda water 2 cups champagne 2 cups soda water 1 bunch mint
A boiled egg-clarified coffee of the sort served in demitasses after dinner. The text as printed has lost the coffee measurement and has picked up the ingredient list of an unrelated wine cup from the next recipe, so read it with that in mind.
- The missing quantityNo amount of ground coffee is given; the line appears to have been lost. With 5 cups of water in total (4 boiling plus 1 cold), a tablespoon or more per cup — the rate contemporary books of this type give for black demitasse coffee — is the safest basis for reconstructing it.
- The chicoryThe amount reads only "ounce chicory" and the fraction is lost; half an ounce to an ounce of roasted, ground chicory root is the plausible range. Chicory is still sold in the coffee aisle, most easily as part of a New Orleans-style blend, and contributes bitterness and body rather than caffeine.
- Why the eggThis is the hinge. A slightly beaten egg mixed with the dry grounds and cold water coagulates during boiling and traps the fine sediment, dropping it as a raft. Skip the egg and boiled coffee comes to the table cloudy and gritty.
- Boiling five minutesModern practice avoids boiling coffee at all, since it drives off the aromatic oils and extracts harsh compounds. Five minutes at a full rolling boil will taste scorched; keep it at the barest simmer, or take the second option in the recipe and use it as drip coffee.
- "Back of range"The cool rear of a wood or coal range, warm enough to hold near-boiling without cooking further — a burner on its lowest setting, or off the heat covered, does the same job. The five-minute rest is for settling the grounds, not for extraction.
- "French coffee pot"Of this period this means a two-chamber drip pot, not a plunger press. Any pour-over cone or drip basket serves; the recipe's direction to pour the liquid back through the bed until the required strength is reached is how such pots were worked.
- The trailing ingredientsThe claret, curaçao, champagne, soda water and mint at the end are not part of this coffee. They belong to a claret or champagne cup printed nearby in the book and were run together in transcription.
- Yield and serviceAbout five cups of liquid, which is a dozen or so demitasse servings depending on cup size. Served black, without sugar or cream, as the recipe insists.
Boiled coffee cleared with egg was the American standard for most of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks argued over whether to use the whole egg, only the white, or merely the crushed shell. The chicory here is worth noting: roasted chicory root entered coffee first as a wartime and hard-times extender, most famously in France and in New Orleans, but by the time this book appeared it was also used deliberately, as it is in this recipe, to give a small after-dinner cup more depth and a darker bitterness than coffee alone would carry. The insistence on no sugar and no cream marks the cup as the closing move of a formal dinner rather than a breakfast drink — the same distinction French cooking draws between café au lait in the morning and black café noir at the end of the meal.