Boiled Coffee
Allow one tablespoonful of finely ground coffee to one cup of boiling water. Put clean eggshells in the pot, or a whole egg is beaten with a little cold water and mixed with the coffee before the boiling water is poured on. Put on the stove, and when it comes to a boil, take off cover and remove from fire. Let stand two or three minutes, then cover and return to the fire until it again comes to a boil. Remove at once, let stand five minutes, and it is then ready to serve.
This is egg coffee, a boiled-pot method that predates the electric drip machine and still works on a stove. The whole point is the egg, which clarifies the brew and drops the grounds.
- The hinge: the eggThe beaten egg (or the shells alone, which are weaker) coagulates in the heat and traps the fine grounds, carrying them to the bottom. Skip it and the cup is muddier. The recipe gives no quantity for the egg; it says only that a whole egg is beaten with a little cold water and mixed with the coffee before the boiling water goes on.
- Grind"Finely ground" is not defined in the text. A medium-fine grind extracts fast in the two short boils and the egg raft should still hold it; a very fine powder may slip through.
- Twice to a boilThe two boils with a rest between get the extraction done without prolonged boiling, which strips aromatics and makes coffee harsh. Pull it the instant it lifts, both times, and do not let it roll.
- The potThe recipe does not specify a pot. Any deep saucepan works; pour off carefully or strain through a fine sieve rather than tipping the sediment in.
- Boiling water poured onThe original starts with boiling water added to the coffee-and-egg mixture rather than heating everything from cold. This wets the grounds evenly and shortens the time on the fire. Keep that order.
- YieldNo yield is given. A batch made with four cups of water serves two generously.
Egg coffee belongs to the era of the campfire, the church basement and the farmhouse range, when grounds were boiled loose in the pot and something was needed to settle them. The trick is generally traced to Scandinavian immigrant communities in the American Midwest, where it is still made at Lutheran church suppers, though clarifying with egg or isinglass was standard practice in English and American kitchens well before that and shows up in cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century. Filter and percolator methods eventually pushed the boiled pot aside, but the egg-clarified version survived precisely because it makes a clean, mellow cup from cheap grounds and no equipment.