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Boiled Coffee
One tablespoon to each cup and one for pot, one tablespoon cold water, one spoon egg white. Put coffee and egg in pot, set on back of stove, pour over cold water, mix, then pour the amount needed of boiling water. Boil three or four minutes. Then set again back of stove, settle with a little cold water and steep a few minutes before serving. Serve with warm milk.
A boiled or "egg" coffee, made in an open pot rather than a percolator or drip cone. The method works, but only with a coarse grind and strict attention to the short boil.
- Grind coarseFine espresso or drip grind will pass straight through the egg raft and into the cup, and will over-extract in the few minutes of boiling. Use the coarsest setting, as for a French press.
- "One for the pot"The proportion is one tablespoon of ground coffee per cup of water plus one extra tablespoon for the pot as a whole. For six cups that is seven tablespoons, on the light side of modern brewing recommendations.
- "Back of the stove"On a coal or wood range this was the cooler zone away from the firebox. On a gas or electric hob it means the lowest setting, or simply off the heat entirely.
- The egg whiteThe white, and in many versions the crushed shell as well, coagulates in the hot water and traps fine grounds, giving a clearer, milder brew. "One spoon egg white" points to a tablespoon or so of lightly beaten white for a small pot; a whole white would be used for a larger one.
- Wet the coffee firstThe tablespoon of cold water mixed with the grounds and egg before the boiling water goes in keeps the mixture from clumping and lets the white distribute through the bed. Do not skip it.
- Watch the boilThree or four minutes at a bare boil is the outer limit. Longer, or a hard rolling boil, drives off aromatics and turns the cup harsh; the egg cannot rescue over-boiled coffee.
- SettlingA dash of cold water lowers the temperature and drops the raft of egg and grounds to the bottom. Let it stand three to five minutes, then pour slowly without tilting the pot back and forth.
- ServingThe recipe calls for warm milk; warming it keeps a thin-bodied boiled coffee from dropping below drinking temperature. Heat it to a steam, not a boil.
Boiled coffee was a common American household method through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and egg coffee survived longest in camp cooking and in Scandinavian-American communities, where it is still made for church suppers. Before uniform commercial grinding and fine mesh strainers, an open pot left grounds in the cup unless something bound them; egg albumen, which cooks and clarifies much as it does in a consomme or a jelly, was one common solution, sometimes with the crushed shell added. If this recipe is Mrs. Wilson's, she was writing in the 1910s and 1920s, when percolators and drip pots were spreading but not yet universal, and cookbooks of the era often gave boiled, percolated and filtered coffee side by side.