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Coffee
5 tablespoons ground coffee White of 1 egg (or less) 4 cups boiling water 1 cup cold water Use an aluminum or granite-ware pot and always make the coffee fresh, scalding the pot each time before using. , scalding the pot each time before using.
Wash the egg; break and beat slightly. Add half the cold water; mix some with the coffee; put in the pot and add the boiling water. Bring to the boiling point; add the remainder of the cold water to hasten the grounds in settling. Stand. the pot where it will keep hot but not boil for five minutes; then serve at once, as coffee allowed to stand becomes flat and loses its aroma. The egg is not necessary; but most cooks use a clean shell or a little of the white of an egg. Others beat the whole egg with a of the white of an egg. Others beat the whole egg with a little water, but use only a portion of it, keeping the rest for further use in a covered glass in the ice chest.
This is boiled coffee clarified with egg white — the standard American method before drip and percolator equipment became universal. It works, but it depends on a coarse grind and on never letting the pot actually boil for long.
- The hinge: bring it to a boil, then stopThe coffee goes to the boiling point and no further; after that it sits somewhere warm for five minutes to steep and settle. Sustained boiling strips the aromatics and pushes bitter compounds into the cup, which is exactly the "flat" result the recipe warns against.
- GrindUse a coarse grind, the texture of raw sugar. Anything finer will slip past the settling trick and give you silt in the cup — the egg and the cold water can only do so much.
- What the egg actually doesEgg white proteins coagulate in the hot water and trap fine grounds and bitter colloids, dragging them to the bottom. It also rounds off harshness. The recipe is right that it is optional; a rinsed crushed shell alone contributes calcium carbonate that slightly lowers acidity.
- Aluminum or granite-wareGranite-ware is enamelled steel. The recipe does not say why these two are specified; period advice commonly warned against tin and untinned iron as sources of a metallic taste. Any enamel, stainless or glass vessel does the same job today.
- The cold water at the endAdding cold water after the boil is the recipe's stated way 'to hasten the grounds in settling'; the usual explanation is that the cooler water makes the suspended grounds sink faster. Note that only half the cup goes in at this stage — the rest was beaten with the egg — so it will not cool the pot appreciably, and the recipe keeps it hot afterwards.
- Storing the beaten eggThe instruction to keep leftover beaten egg in a covered glass in the ice chest reflects a colder, slower kitchen. Refrigerate it at 40F or below and use it within a day; beaten raw egg spoils faster than a whole egg in the shell.
- YieldFour cups boiling water plus one cup cold, less what the grounds absorb, gives roughly four and a half cups of finished coffee.
- Why it is filed under Canning and PreservingNothing here is preserved; the reason for the placement is not apparent from the page.
Egg coffee belongs to the long era of the boiling pot, when American households brewed coffee by putting grounds and water in the same vessel over heat and then had to solve the problem of getting the grounds out again. Egg white was the household clarifier of choice, used the same way cooks clarified stock and jelly, and the practice is still visible today in Scandinavian-American church-basement coffee in the upper Midwest, where large urns of egg coffee remain a fixture. Mrs. Fryer's insistence on scalding the pot before every use points at the other chronic fault of the period: coffee oils go rancid in a warm pot, and a stale vessel taints an otherwise good brew. The instruction to serve at once rather than let the pot stand is advice commonly repeated by writers of the era, and it seems often to have gone unheeded: the pot at the back of the range was a fixture of the American kitchen well into the twentieth century.