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Black Coffee (Allow two tablespoons)
Allow two tablespoons of coffee for each cup of boiling water. Always make in French coffee pot. 1 cup coffee
Two lines of instruction and a yield, which tells you this entry exists to supply strong coffee to something else in the Frozen Dishes chapter rather than to fill a breakfast cup.
- The ratio is the whole recipeTwo tablespoons of ground coffee per cup of water is roughly 10-11 g to 240 ml, a solidly strong brew by modern measure. If it is destined for a sweetened, cream-diluted frozen dish, do not scale it down; a coffee that tastes right in a cup will read as very faint once frozen.
- "French coffee pot"In American books of this period the term generally means a two-chamber drip pot of the biggin type: grounds sit in a perforated upper basket and boiling water is poured over to filter down into the lower pot. It is not a French press, which was not in general American use then. A pour-over cone is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Boiling waterThe recipe says boiling water. Water at a full rolling boil tends to over-extract and taste bitter; letting the kettle stand half a minute off the heat, to around 200F, is the modern preference.
- GrindA drip pot of this type wants a medium grind. Too fine and the basket clogs and the water stalls; too coarse and the single pass through will be thin, which defeats the point of a coffee meant to survive freezing.
- "1 cup coffee"This trailing line reads as the yield, written the way an ingredient would be, which suggests the coffee is intended as a measured component of another dish.
- Use it freshBrew it, cool it quickly over ice or in a shallow pan, and use it the same day. Coffee held warm or kept overnight turns flat and papery, and that dullness is amplified rather than hidden by sugar and cream.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and belongs to the long tradition of cookbooks issued by food firms to sell an ingredient. Coffee in a frozen-dishes chapter is not an oddity: American cooks of the period made coffee ice creams, coffee parfaits and biscuit glacé too — that is, flavored with strong black infusion. The insistence on the French pot reflects a genuine late-nineteenth-century preference among some American cookbook writers, though boiled coffee, often cleared with egg, remained common in the period literature. The instruction to measure two tablespoons to the cup is also of its moment, when writers such as Fannie Farmer were pushing level, standardized measurement into kitchens that had run on handfuls.