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Coffee for Twenty-five People
Take one egg to a pound of finely ground coffee, moisten thoroughly with cold water, and let stand for several hours. Tie coffee in a muslin bag, and put in eight quarts of freshly boiling water, and boil for five minutes. Let stand ten minutes before serving. Serve with cream.
A batch-brew method from the era before urns and paper filters, scaled for a church supper or lodge meeting. It works, but the five-minute boil is the part worth rethinking.
- The egg is a clarifier, not a flavouringBeaten egg coagulates in the hot water and traps the fine grounds and suspended particles that make boiled coffee cloudy and bitter. (Some versions of the method use the crushed shell as well; this one does not say so.) Here the muslin bag does most of that work already, so the egg is belt-and-braces; if you skip it, use a tighter-woven bag or a doubled layer of cheesecloth.
- The five-minute boilThis is the instruction modern practice has overturned. Prolonged boiling drives off aromatics and extracts bitter compounds. The ten-minute rest afterward does much of the brewing, and dropping the bag into water just off the boil and letting it steep 8 to 10 minutes tends to give a cleaner cup from the same grounds.
- Grind"Finely ground" made sense for a short boil with a cloth bag. If you steep rather than boil, a medium-coarse grind extracts more evenly and will not push silt through the muslin.
- The muslin bagScald a new bag in plain boiling water first, or the sizing and the smell of the cloth end up in the coffee. Fill it no more than two-thirds full so the grounds can swell and circulate; a tightly packed bag brews unevenly.
- VesselEight quarts of water plus a pound of wet grounds needs a 12-quart stockpot at minimum, and the full pot will weigh over 20 lb. Enamel or stainless is preferable; bare aluminium and cast iron are often said to give coffee a metallic edge.
- Holding itPull the bag out as soon as the steeping time is up. Coffee left sitting on its grounds, or held over direct heat, turns harsh quickly; keep it warm in a thermal container instead.
- ServingAbout 25 cups. "Serve with cream" means real cream, or scalded milk in its place; the recipe makes no mention of sugar.
The egg-clarified boiled coffee this describes is older than any printed batch version of it: boiling grounds loose in a pot and settling them with egg, eggshell, or a splash of cold water was a common American method through the nineteenth century. Tying the coffee in a bag was a tidier institutional refinement of that practice, and quantity recipes like this one were written for suppers, fairs and meeting halls rather than for families.