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Boiled Coffee
For 4 cups. Beat half of 1 egg white with 3 tablespoons cold water; add 3/4 cup ground coffee and stir until moistened; put into scalded coffee pot; add 1 quart boiling water and boil 5 minutes. Add 1/4 cup cold water and allow to stand 3 minutes to settle before serving.
This is coffee made the pre-percolator way, cleared with egg white rather than filtered. The technique works, but the proportions and the timing both need reading in period terms.
- Half an egg whiteBeat one white lightly and measure out about 1 tablespoon; that is half of a large white. The albumen coagulates in the hot water and traps the fine grounds, which is the only clarification this method gets. Many period coffee recipes add the crushed shell as well, though this one does not.
- "Scalded coffee pot"Rinse the pot with boiling water and pour it out just before brewing. It preheats the metal so the quart of boiling water does not drop out of the extraction range immediately, and it rinses away stale coffee oils, which turn rancid fast in an unglazed or tin-lined pot.
- Cup size"For 4 cups" here means coffee cups of roughly 6 fl oz rather than four 8-oz mugs; a quart plus the final 1/4 cup, less what the grounds absorb, will in fact run somewhat over that.
- GrindUse a coarse grind, coarser than drip. Fine grounds will pass the egg-white raft and give you silt in the cup, and they over-extract badly under a five-minute boil.
- The five minutes of boilingThis is the instruction modern practice has overturned. Sustained boiling drives off aromatics and pulls out bitter phenolics; brewing at just off the boil for four minutes will give a cleaner cup, though you may need slightly more coffee to match the strength. If you want the period result, follow it as written and expect a heavy, slightly bitter cup.
- The cold-water dabThe 1/4 cup of cold water at the end is too little to be for dilution; the traditional explanation is that it helps the grounds and coagulated egg sink. The three minutes of stillness the recipe calls for does the real work, and stirring at this stage undoes it.
- StrengthThree-quarters of a cup of grounds to a quart works out at roughly 1:15 by weight, at the strong end of modern drip practice. Scale back to 1/2 cup if you want it lighter.
Egg-cleared boiled coffee was the standard American method through most of the nineteenth century, and it survives in "cowboy coffee" and in Scandinavian kokkaffe. Before paper filters became common household goods, the problem was not extraction but suspended grounds, and the same clarifying principle used for consommé and jelly applies: egg albumen sets as it heats and carries fine particles with it.