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French Coffee
1 cup very finely ground or 6 cups boiling water powdered coffee Place coffee in strainer, add boiling water gradually, and refilter, if liked very strong.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column typesetting: it reads 1 cup very finely ground or powdered coffee and 6 cups boiling water. What follows is essentially a pour-over, made deliberately strong because it is meant to be frozen.
- The ratioOne cup of ground coffee to six cups of water is about 85 g of coffee to 1.4 L of water, at the strong end of ordinary brewing. Cream, sugar and freezing all mute coffee flavour, so a weak brew tastes of nothing once frozen.
- Grind"Very finely ground or powdered" suits a cloth or fine metal strainer with slow percolation. In a paper filter this grind will stall and overflow; use a medium-fine drip grind and accept a slightly longer pour, or brew it in a French press and strain.
- "Refilter"Pouring the finished coffee back through the same bed, as the recipe allows, gives extra strength. It also pulls bitter compounds from spent grounds. Brewing a fresh, tighter batch gives a cleaner result.
- Water temperatureFull boiling water over a powder grind scorches the extraction. Let the kettle stand a half minute off the boil, around 200F, and add the water in stages as the recipe says rather than all at once.
- Where this is goingIf this sits among the frozen dishes, it reads as a base for coffee ice cream, parfait or a frozen coffee punch rather than a cup of breakfast coffee. Chill it completely before combining with cream or custard so the mixture does not need long in the freezer.
- YieldAbout five cups of finished brew, allowing for what the grounds absorb.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks distinguished sharply between "boiled coffee," where grounds were boiled with water and often cleared with egg shell, and "French coffee," which meant filtration — water passed through a bed of fine grounds in a biggin or filtre, a method generally traced to French makers of the early 1800s and much admired by writers who found boiled coffee muddy. Lowney's was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional book for its chocolate and cocoa. The instruction to add boiling water "gradually" calls for a slow, even wetting of the bed rather than a flood.