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Another Method (Pour a pint of boiling water)
Pour a pint of boiling water on an ounce of coffee; let it boil five or six minutes, then pour out a cupful two or three times, and return it again; put two or three isinglass chips into it, or a lump or two of fine sugar; boil it five minutes longer. Set the pot by the fire to keep hot for ten minutes, and the coffee will be beautifully clear. Some like a small bit of vanilla. Cream or boiled milk should always be served with coffee.
In Egypt, coffee is made by pouring boiling water upon ground coffee in the cup; to which only sugar is added. For those who like it extremely strong, make only eight cups from three ounces. If not fresh roasted, lay it before a fire till hot and dry; or put the smallest bit of fresh butter into a preserving-pan; when hot throw the coffee into it, and toss it about till it be freshened. Coffee most certainly promotes wakefulness, or, in other words, it suspends the inclination to sleep. A very small cup of coffee, holding about a wineglassfull, called by the French une demi tasse, drunk after dinner very strong, without cream or milk, is apt to promote digestion.
Persons afflicted with asthma have found great relief, and even a cure, from drinking very strong coffee, and those of a phlegmatic habit would do The process consists in simmering over a small but steady flame of a lamp. To accomplish this a vessel of peculiar construction is requisite. It should be a straight-sided pot, as wide at the top as at the bottom, and inclosed in a case of similar shape, to which it must be soldered air-tight at the top. The case to be above an inch wider than the pot, and descending somewhat less than an inch below it. It should be entirely open at the botair round and underneath the pot. The lid to be double, and the vessel, of course, furnished with a convenient handle and spout.
The extract may be made either with hot water or cold. If wanted for speedy use, hot water, not actually boiling, will be proper, and the powdered coffee being added, close the lid tight, stop the spout with a cork, and place the vessel over the lamp. It will soon begin to simmer, and may remain unattended, till the coffee is wanted . It may then be strained through a bag of stout, close linen, which will transmit the liquid so perfectly clear as not to contain the smallest particle of the powder.
Though a fountain lamp is preferable, any of the common small lamps, seen in every tin shop, will answer the purpose. Alcohol, pure spermaceti oil, or some of the recent preparations of petroleum are best, and if the wick be too high , or the oil not good, the consequence will be smoke, soot, and extinction of the aroma. The wick should be little more than one eighth of an inch high. In this process, no trimming is required.
It may be left to simmer, and will continue simwill continue simmering all night without boiling over, and without any sensible diminution of quantity. Parisian Method of making Coffee.
In the first place, let coffee be of the prime quality, piece of butter rolled in flour. Pour the sauce into the dish, lay the meat in with the force-meat balls, and garnish with lemon. grain small, round, hard, and clear; perfectly | some spice. Let it stew, and thicken it with a dry and sweet; and at least three years old-let it be gently roasted until it be of a light brown color; avoid burning, for a single scorched grain will spoil a pound. Let this operation be performed at the moment the coffee is to be used; then grind it while it is yet warm, and take of the Lamb's Kidneys, au vin.
Cut your kidneys lengthways, but not through, powder an ounce for each cup intended to be made; put 4 or 5 on a skewer, lay them on a gridiron put this along with a small quantity of shredded saffron into the upper part of the machine, called a grecque or biggin; that is, a large coffee-pot with an upper receptacle made to fit close into it, the bottom of which is perforated with small holes, and containing in its interior two movable metal strainers, over the second of which the powder is to be placed, and immediately under the third; upon this upper strainer pour boiling water, and continue doing so gently until it bubbles up through the strainer; then shut the cover of the machine close down, place it near the fire, and so soon as the water has drained through the coffee, repeat the operation until the whole intended quantity be passed. Thus all the fragrance of its perfume will be retained with all the balsamic and stimube retained with all the balsamic and stimulating powers of its essence; and in a few moments will be obtained - without the aid of isin glass, whites of eggs, or any of the substances with which, in the common mode of preparation, it is mixed-a beverage for the gods. This is the true Parisian mode of preparing coffee; the invention of it is due to M. de Belloy, nephew to the Cardinal of the same name.
A coffee-pot upon an entirely new plan, called the Old Dominion, and made in Philadelphia, Pa., is very much liked by some. Perhaps, however, the old mode of boiling and clearing with egg, or the French mode, with the biggin or strainer, is the best.
Sufficient attention is not, however, paid to the proper roasting of the berry, which is of the utmost importance; to have the berry done just enough and not a grain burnt. It is customary now in most large cities for grocers to keep coffee ready roasted, which they have done in large wire cylinders, and generally well done, but not always fresh.
Coffee Milk.
Boil a dessertspoonful of ground coffee in about a pint of milk a quarter of an hour; then put in it a shaving or two of isinglass, and clear it; let it boil a few minutes, and set it on the side of the fire to fine. Those of a spare habit, and disposed towards affections of the lungs, would do well to use this for breakfast, instead of ordinary coffee.
This is really three or four coffee methods run together: a boiled-and-cleared English pot, an alcohol-lamp infusion, the Parisian drip pot, and coffee milk. The proportions are usable; most of the technique is not.
- The proportion is the useful partAn ounce of ground coffee to a pint of water is close to modern strength: roughly 28 g to 475 ml, which works out at about 60 g per litre (on a British pint it would be weaker). The "eight cups from three ounces" note seems to assume small after-dinner cups rather than mugs.
- Do not boil itFive or six minutes at a boil, then five minutes more, strips the aromatics and extracts the bitter phenolics that make old-fashioned boiled coffee taste scorched. Water just off the boil, three to four minutes of contact, is the modern equivalent of everything this page is trying to achieve.
- IsinglassDried sturgeon swim bladder, sold in chips as a clarifying agent and still used in some cask beers. It settles suspended grounds. A paper filter or a fine mesh does the same job in seconds and is what the recipe's own Parisian section boasts of not needing.
- Pouring out and returning the cupfulsThis is a crude recirculation meant to wash grounds off the surface and back into the liquid. With any filter method it serves no purpose.
- "Freshening" stale coffeeWarming stale beans, or tossing them with a scrap of butter in a hot pan, drives off some staleness but adds a fatty note that goes rancid quickly. Stale coffee is stale; buy less at a time instead.
- Biggin, grecque, and the lamp potThe biggin or grecque is a two-chamber drip pot — the direct ancestor of the pour-over cone, and the instruction to pour boiling water gently and repeatedly is recognisable modern practice. The lamp-simmered vessel described in the middle of the page is a vacuum-free steeping pot; left simmering all night, as it suggests, the result would be undrinkable.
- Roasting at homeThe advice to roast to a light brown and grind while still warm is sound in principle, though coffee is generally at its best a few days to two weeks after roasting rather than immediately. The claim that beans should be three years old refers to green, unroasted coffee, which was aged in the trade.
- Coffee milkA dessertspoonful of grounds to a pint of milk, boiled a quarter hour, will scald and skin the milk. Steep the grounds in hot milk off the heat for five minutes and strain.
- Health claimsThe remarks on asthma, phlegmatic habits and consumptive tendencies are nineteenth-century medical opinion, not advice. The observation that coffee suspends the inclination to sleep has held up rather better.
These coffee pages catch the moment when English-speaking households were being persuaded to stop boiling their coffee. The old method — boil hard, then clear the murk with isinglass or egg white — was giving way to filtration, and the writer credits the drip pot to M. de Belloy, a Parisian to whom the invention of the percolating cafetière around 1800 is traditionally attributed. The "biggin" name is generally traced to an English maker, though the derivation is not certain, and the pot itself, an upper chamber with a perforated bottom sitting over a lower one, is essentially a pour-over cone with a lid. The Egyptian note — boiling water poured straight onto grounds in the cup with sugar, no milk — is close to how unfiltered coffee is still drunk across the eastern Mediterranean, though it is more usually brewed in a long-handled pot than in the cup itself. The passing mention of grocers roasting coffee in large wire cylinders marks the arrival of commercial roasting, which over the following decades would displace much home roasting and make the book's careful warnings about a single scorched grain someone else's problem.