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Coffee in Bulk
1 pound ground coffee 9 quarts water 1 egg Mix the coffee with the egg that has been thinned by a little water, and tie it into four muslin bags. Let these soak in the water for three or four hours; bring to a boil and serve. This amount will serve fifty persons. 2 teaspoons tea TEA 4 cups boiling water Use an earthen or china teapot and have water freshly boiled. Scald out the teapot; put in the tea and pour on the boiling water. Let stand in a warm place for five minutes; pour off and serve. Never let the tea boil; never let it stand a long time on the leaves; and never make more by adding fresh leaves to the old.
Two beverage formulas for feeding a crowd and for a proper pot at home. The coffee is egg-clarified boiled coffee, a method that predates the drip cone and behaves nothing like it.
- The egg is the hingeEgg proteins coagulate as the water heats and carry suspended fines with them, giving a clearer brew. The recipe calls for one whole egg thinned with a little water and mixed through the grounds.
- Scale and yieldOne pound of coffee to nine quarts of water is roughly 2 tablespoons per 8-ounce cup, about the same strength as modern practice. Nine quarts is 36 eight-ounce cups, so the fifty servings the recipe claims must be reckoned in smaller cups.
- Muslin bagsFour bags of unbleached muslin or a doubled layer of cheesecloth, tied loosely so the grounds can swell. Loose grounds work too, but then the pot must settle and be poured off carefully.
- Cold soak, then boilThe three or four hours of cold steeping extracts a good deal; the boil sets the egg and brings it to serving heat. Bring it just to a boil and pull it off, as prolonged boiling turns the coffee bitter and flat.
- Holding itLift the bags out as soon as it boils. Coffee left on the grounds in a hot urn keeps extracting and goes woody. If it must be held, strain into a heated insulated container.
- Tea proportionsTwo teaspoons to four cups is weaker than the usual one teaspoon per cup plus one for the pot. Adjust to the leaf; a large-leaf black tea takes a heaped measure, a broken or CTC grade less.
- Scalding the potNot fussiness. A cold earthenware pot pulls the water below the temperature black tea needs, and the five-minute steep will underextract.
- Pour offThe instruction to pour off after five minutes probably means decanting the brew off the leaves rather than leaving them in, since otherwise the last cups are stewed and tannic.
Boiled coffee cleared with egg is often said to have been the usual American method well into the twentieth century, and the church-supper or lodge-hall version made in a wash boiler with grounds tied in muslin is sometimes called "egg coffee" — a name still associated with Scandinavian-American communities in the upper Midwest, where it survives at Lutheran church functions. Its appearance in a book of the period alongside tea reflects the fact that beverage-making for fifty was a domestic skill, not a caterer's job. The tea instructions are worth noting for what they forbid: boiling the leaves, long standing, and topping up an old pot with new leaves, all of which cookbook writers of the period seem to have thought worth arguing against.