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Serving Coffee
Cream is usually served with coffee, but scalded milk renders the coffee more digestible than does cream. Fill the cup one fourth full of hot scalded milk; pour on the freshly-made coffee, adding sugar if desired.
Whether cream or milk is used, it is better to pour the coffee on the cream or milk.
After-dinner coffee should be made very strong and served black.
A serving note rather than a brewing formula, but it does tell you how to assemble the cup, and the order it gives still matters.
- The hinge: milk firstThe recipe is firm that the coffee should go onto the milk or cream rather than the other way round, though it gives no reason. The usual traditional explanation, also offered for milk-first tea, is that the dairy meets the hot liquid gradually rather than all at once.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating milk to just below boiling, until a skin forms and bubbles ring the edge of the pan, around 180F. In the period this was partly a keeping-quality measure for raw milk; with pasteurized milk the point today is simply temperature, so the coffee is not cooled by cold dairy.
- "More digestible"The claim that scalded milk is easier on the stomach than cream is period dietetic belief, not established fact. Cream is richer in fat and slower to leave the stomach, which is likely all that was meant.
- One fourth fullOne part milk to three parts coffee. That is markedly milkier than a modern splash, though short of the roughly equal-parts proportion usually meant by cafe au lait.
- After-dinner coffee"Very strong and served black" describes what was generally served in a small cup of a few ounces rather than a full breakfast cup, taken without milk or cream.
- Freshly madeThe instruction is doing real work. Coffee held over heat loses aroma and turns bitter and flat; brew close to serving and hold in a warmed pot off direct heat.
Instructions like this one belong to a genre of turn-of-the-century domestic writing that treated coffee less as a craft than as a question of health and propriety. Scalding milk was routine household practice before pasteurization was universal, and cookbooks of the period repeat, often without evidence, that scalded milk sat better than cream. The distinction the note draws between breakfast coffee, generously milked, and strong black after-dinner coffee follows French service, where the small cup of black coffee closed the meal and was sometimes accompanied by a liqueur.