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Instantaneous Coffee
6 tablespoons pulverized coffee 6 cups boiling water A variety of pots are on the market for making instantaneous coffee, all containing a strainer to hold the coffee, which must be pulverized, not simply ground. Put the coffee in the strainer; scald out the pot; adjust the strainer and set the pot where the coffee will keep hot but not boil. Pour on freshly boiled water slowly, covering between additions. When filtered pour off one cup and let it run again through the strainer. Serve at once.
This is drip coffee, not instant: "instantaneous" here means the brew is ready as soon as the water has run through, as opposed to the boiled or egg-settled coffee that took twenty minutes on the range. The whole method still works in any pour-over cone.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe pot sits where it stays hot but does not simmer, and the water is poured off the boil rather than boiled in the pot. Coffee held at a boil turns bitter and flat within minutes; brewed coffee should be held below about 185F or served immediately.
- "Pulverized, not simply ground"The recipe insists on a very fine grind, presumably to get full extraction from a single quick pass through the strainer. In a modern paper filter that same fine grind will choke and over-extract. Use a medium grind for a cone or flat-bottom filter, finer only if the water runs through too fast.
- StrengthSix tablespoons to six cups is roughly 30 g of coffee to 1.4 litres of water, considerably weaker than current practice. A modern ratio of about 60 g per litre would call for roughly 85 g, or about seventeen tablespoons, for six cups; even doubling the original to twelve tablespoons makes a distinctly stronger cup than the recipe as written.
- Water temperature"Freshly boiled" meant water taken straight from the kettle. Let it stand thirty seconds off the boil; 195-205F is the working range.
- Pouring in stagesCovering the pot between additions keeps the temperature up and, incidentally, wets the grounds evenly. This is the same logic as the modern bloom-and-pulse pour.
- Running a cup back throughThe recipe does not say why; re-passing a cupful through the grounds would have strengthened or evened out the pot. With a paper filter and a steady pour this step is unnecessary, and re-pouring cooled coffee over spent grounds only dulls it.
- Scalding the potWorth keeping. A cold pot pulls several degrees off the brew, and drip coffee has no thermal margin to spare.
- YieldSix standard cups, or about four modern mugs.
Drip or filter coffee spread from France in the early nineteenth century, associated with the De Belloy-style filter pot of about 1800 and with the earlier biggin, and it reached American kitchens through imported hardware and, later, domestic imitations. What they displaced was boiled coffee: grounds tipped into a pot of water, simmered, and cleared with an eggshell or a dash of cold water to settle the sediment. Against that, a pot that produced clear coffee the moment the water finished running through fairly earned the name "instantaneous" -- a word that at this date had nothing to do with soluble coffee powder, which was only beginning to be commercialised.