Coffee, Nutritious
INGREDIENTS for one large cup. - oz. of ground coffee, 1 pint of milk.
Let the coffee be freshly ground; put it into a saucepan with the milk, which should be made nearly boiling before the COFFEE, TO MAKE. coffee is put in, and boil together for 3 minutes; clear it by pouring some of it into a cup, and then back again, and leave it on the hob for a few minutes to sette thoroughly. This coffee may be made still more nutritious by the addition of an egg well beaten, and put into the coffee-cup.
TIME.-5 minutes to boil, 5 minutes to settle.
COFFEE, TO MAKE. water, and when all the water so poured has disappeared from the funnel, and made its way down the centre pipe and up again through the ground coffee by hydrostatic pressure, unscrew the lid and cover the Pour back direct into the urn, not through the funnel, one, two or three cups, according to the size of the percolater, in order to make the infusion of uniform strength; the contents will then be ready urn.
Coffee, Simple Method of for use, and should run from the tap strong, Making. INGREDIENTS.-Allow oz., or 1 tablespoonful, of coffee to each person; to every oz. allow 1/2 pint of water.
Have a small iron ring made to fit the top of the coffee-pot inside, and to this ring sew a small muslin bag (the muslin for the purpose must not be too thin).
Fit the bag into the pot, warm the pot with some boiling water; throw this away, and put the ground coffee into the bag; pour over as much boiling water as is required, close the lid, and, when all the water has filtered through, remove the bag, and send the coffee to table. Making it in this manner prevents the necessity of pouring the coffee from one vessel to another, which cools and spoils it. The water should be poured on the coffee gradually, so that the infusion may be stronger; and the bag must be well made, that none of the grounds may escape through the seams, and so make the coffee thick and muddy.
A milk-based coffee rather than a water-based one, closer to a breakfast drink than to after-dinner coffee. It is quick, but the quantity of coffee has to be judged rather than read off the page.
- The coffee weight is missingThe ingredient line has lost its fraction, so the exact dose cannot be recovered from this text. The companion recipe on the same page allows a fraction of an ounce, given as 1 tablespoonful, per person; start modestly with a tablespoon or two to the pint of milk and adjust to taste.
- An imperial pintA British pint here is 20 fl oz, or 2 1/2 US cups. That makes one very large breakfast cup or two ordinary mugs, not one modern coffee cup.
- Grind and methodThis is a boiled coffee, not a filtered one, so the grounds sit in the milk throughout. Use a coarse grind; a fine espresso grind will make the drink gritty and bitter and will not settle out.
- Watch the milkMilk boiled for three minutes with grounds in it will catch and scorch on the bottom of a thin pan. Use a heavy saucepan, keep it at a bare simmer, and stir. Scalded milk ruins the whole cup.
- "Leave it on the hob"The hob was the shelf at the side of a coal range, warm but not hot. The modern equivalent is a covered pan set off the heat for five minutes, which lets the grounds fall.
- Clearing it properlyPouring a cupful back into the pan settles some grounds but not all. Straining through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a paper filter gives a cleaner result and does not cool the drink much if the cups are warmed first.
- The beaten eggThe egg is whisked in the cup and the hot coffee poured onto it, which does not reliably bring the egg to a safe temperature. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised should leave it out; pasteurized eggs are the sensible substitute.
- TimingThe method says three minutes' boiling and the TIME note says five. Three is ample; longer only drives off aroma and increases the chance of scorching.
Coffee made with milk instead of water was often recommended as invalid and nursery fare in Victorian households, which may be why this entry is described as "nutritious" rather than simply as coffee: it was counted as food, a way of getting milk and, with the egg, protein into someone with little appetite. The optional beaten egg links it to the egg-and-milk restoratives of the same period, such as egg flip and egg nogg, which appear in nineteenth-century domestic manuals as strengthening drinks for the sick. The boiling method it uses was being displaced by percolators and by the muslin-bag filter described alongside it, both of which were promoted on the grounds that boiling drives off the aroma; boiled coffee nonetheless survived in home kitchens well into the twentieth century.