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Iced Tea
Make tea. Serve in glasses with crushed ice, with one tablespoon lemon juice in each glass.
Boiled Coffee No. I 1 cup freshly ground coffee 1 whole egg or one egg white 1 cup cold water 6 cups boiling water Mix coffee, egg and one half cup cold water, add boiling water, boil hard five minutes. Set on back part of range, add other half cup of cold water, let stand five minutes, and serve with hot milk, cream and sugar.
Coffee No. 2 Use rule for Boiled Coffee, using six cups cold water instead of boiling water. 1 cup coffee Coffee No. 3 6 cups cold water Put coffee in cheese cloth bag. Tie, allowing room for coffee to swell. Place in scalded coffee pot, cover with cold water, and boil ten minutes. Remove bag, let stand two minutes on back of range, and serve with hot milk, sugar and cream.
Four beverage rules run together in the original text: iced tea, then three methods for boiled coffee. The coffee proportions are sound; the boiling times are not, and that is the one thing worth changing.
- The hinge: five minutes of hard boilingBoiling coffee grounds drives off the aromatic oils and pulls out bitter tannins. Modern practice steeps at just off the boil, around 195-205F, for four minutes. If you follow the book, expect a harsh, flat cup.
- What the egg doesEgg protein coagulates in the hot brew and traps suspended grounds and fine sediment, dropping them out as a raft. This is the same clarifying trick used for consommé. The egg is fully cooked by the boil, so there is no raw-egg concern; some cooks crushed in the rinsed shell as well.
- Coffee proportionsOne cup of ground coffee to six cups of water is roughly 80-85 g to 1.4 L — strong by current standards but within reason, since the cup was intended to be cut with hot milk. A conventional ratio is about 60 g per litre.
- "Back part of range"A coal or wood range had a cooler zone away from the firebox. It means hold the pot warm without further cooking — a burner turned off, or the lowest possible flame.
- The half cup of cold waterAdded after boiling to settle the grounds; the traditional explanation is that the cold water helps the sediment sink. With the egg raft doing most of the work it is belt and braces, but it does no harm.
- Coffee No. 3, the cheesecloth bagAn early infusion basket. Leave real slack, as the recipe directs -- dry grounds swell as they wet and a tight bag will not wet through evenly. Ten minutes at a boil is far longer than the coffee needs.
- Scalded coffee potRinsing the pot with boiling water preheats it so the brew does not drop temperature on contact. Still worth doing. It also mattered more when pots were tin or enamel and held stale coffee oils.
- The iced teaNo quantities are given. Brew tea at roughly double strength if you are pouring it over a full glass of crushed ice, or the melt will thin it to nothing. A tablespoon of lemon juice per glass is a lot of acid without sugar; sweeten to taste.
- YieldThe coffee rules make about six cups of strong brew, or eight to ten servings once milk is added.
Boiled coffee was the American standard well into the twentieth century, and the egg-cleared version — often called "egg coffee" and long associated with Scandinavian-American church suppers in the upper Midwest — was the respectable way to serve it before paper filters and pressure machines were common in homes. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book (1907), a volume published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, reflects the habit of confectionery firms issuing general cookbooks that promoted their product while covering the whole domestic repertoire. Iced tea itself was still a relative novelty in print, its popularity generally traced to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, though chilled tea had been drunk in the American South for decades before that.