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Boiled Coffee
3 tablespoons coffee 3 cups water white of egg Grind coffee moderately fine, add one-half white of egg, and put into perfectly clean coffee pot. Add enough cold water to moisten coffee, then pour measured water over, cover pot closely, and boil 3 minutes. Then pour in 1/2 cup cold water, draw the pot to side of range and allow it to stand five minutes to settle before serving. Never let the coffee boil after cold water has been added. Serves 3.
An open-pot, egg-cleared coffee of the sort a coal range made easy and an electric hob makes a little fussier. The whole method turns on one rule: once the cold water goes in, the pot must not return to a boil.
- StrengthThree tablespoons to three cups is weak by present taste — roughly one tablespoon per 8 oz cup, against the modern standard of about two tablespoons per 6 oz. Increase to taste rather than boiling longer, which only extracts bitterness.
- The egg whiteHalf an egg white, beaten lightly into the dry grounds, coagulates as the pot heats and drags the fine particles down with it. Some households used a crushed shell as well, or instead. The egg is fully cooked by the three-minute boil; the drink is not a raw-egg preparation.
- Grind"Moderately fine" means something close to a drip grind, not espresso-fine. Too fine and the egg cannot capture everything; too coarse and three minutes will not extract enough.
- "Draw the pot to the side of the range"On a coal range the side plate was warm but not hot. On a modern hob, take the pot off the heat entirely and stand it somewhere warm for the five minutes of settling.
- The cold waterThe half cup of cold water at the end is usually explained as cooling and densifying the top layer so suspended grounds sink; whatever the mechanism, it stops extraction and lets the pot settle. Reheating undoes the settling, which is why the instruction against boiling afterwards is absolute.
- The potAny tall, narrow, heavy pot with a lid will serve — a saucepan works, but pour carefully and slowly from one side so the settled bed is not disturbed. A fine strainer at the cup is a reasonable insurance.
- YieldThree cups of measured water plus the half cup added at the end, less the small amount held in the wet grounds; three cups as the recipe claims is about right, and the last of the pot should be left behind with the settled bed.
Boiled coffee was the ordinary American method from the early nineteenth century until percolators and, later, drip pots displaced it — a pot, a fire, and grounds thrown straight into the water. Because nothing filtered the brew, cooks needed a way to clear it, and egg white did the work: the same protein coagulation that clarifies consommé and jelly stocks, borrowed for the breakfast table. Egg shells, cold water, and even a fragment of dried fish skin all appear in nineteenth-century books as settling agents. The insistence that coffee must never boil twice is older than the science usually given for it, but it is sound — prolonged boiling drives off aromatics and pulls out harsh, bitter compounds, which is exactly what "stewed coffee" tasted of.