Cafe Noir
Boil two cloves in a quart of very strong coffee. Serve with sugar in after-dinner coffee cups.
Two lines of text and one real decision: how strong the coffee is and how long the cloves stay in it. Everything else is serving.
- "Very strong coffee"Brew it strong at the outset, at the upper end of a normal ratio or above, rather than reducing weak coffee by boiling, which only concentrates bitterness.
- Do not actually boil itCoffee held at a rolling boil turns harsh and flat. Bring the coffee just to a bare simmer with the cloves, cover, and hold it off the heat for several minutes rather than boiling as written.
- Two cloves is not a misprintWhole cloves are aggressive. Two in a quart reads as a faint warm spice behind the coffee, which is the intent. Four will taste like clove; six will taste medicinal. Fish them out before serving.
- YieldA quart is 32 oz. After-dinner cups — demitasse — hold 2 to 3 oz, so this serves roughly eleven to sixteen people, suggesting it was written for a dinner party rather than a household breakfast.
- Sugar, no milkCafé noir is black coffee by definition; the recipe specifies sugar deliberately and omits cream just as deliberately. Serve sugar at the table rather than sweetening the pot, since demitasse drinkers vary widely.
- EquipmentAny brewing method works. Drip or press coffee brewed at double strength, then warmed with the cloves, gives a cleaner result than boiling.
This comes from a collection of non-alcoholic drinks published as the United States moved toward national Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919 and took effect in January 1920). Books of this kind had a specific job: to give hostesses something to put in the glasses and cups that had formerly held wine and after-dinner liqueurs, and coffee sections in them run long. Café noir is simply French for black coffee, and serving it in tiny cups at the close of a meal was a Continental habit that American dinner tables had adopted through the nineteenth century. Spicing coffee with clove is an old and widespread practice; here it dresses up one of the drinks still permitted to end a formal dinner.