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Percolator Coffee
Allow one heaping tablespoonful of coffee to each cup of boiling water. Place the coffee in the strainer of the percolator, put on the stove, and pour on gradually the water. Allow it to filter, and serve at once.
A two-line method that assumes a pot most kitchens no longer own. The proportions still work; the water temperature and the pouring are where it goes wrong.
- The hinge: water off the boilFull boiling water can scald ground coffee and draw out harsher, more bitter compounds. Let the kettle stand a minute or so after boiling, to around 200F, before it touches the grounds.
- What "percolator" means hereThe pot described is a drip or filter pot — water poured over grounds held in a perforated basket, passing through once. A true pumping percolator recirculates the brew and needs no pouring at all; if that is what you have, fill the base with water, load the basket, and let it cycle six to eight minutes.
- "Strainer"The metal basket with perforated bottom that sits in the pot's upper chamber. A paper filter was not part of it, which is why period coffee carried more sediment and body.
- StrengthA heaping tablespoon is roughly 7-10 g of grounds, and the "cup" behind directions of this kind was commonly nearer 6 oz than 8, though the recipe does not say so. That makes it a little lighter than modern standard strength; measured against an 8 oz cup the coffee will come out thin.
- GrindDrip and percolator baskets need a medium to medium-coarse grind. Fine espresso grind will clog the perforations and drip through slowly enough to over-extract.
- Pour graduallyWet the bed evenly and let each addition drain before adding more. Dumping the full quantity at once channels water down one side and leaves half the grounds barely touched.
- Serve at onceSound advice then and now. Coffee held on a hot stove turns bitter and flat quite quickly; decant it into a warmed jug if it must wait.
- YieldScale directly: six heaping tablespoons to six cups of water. On the 6 oz cup assumed above that comes to about 36 oz, serving four to six.
Filter and percolating pots were the respectable alternative to boiled coffee, which for most of the nineteenth century meant grounds tipped straight into a pot of water, cleared with an eggshell or a splash of cold water, and poured off. Count Rumford is credited with an early nineteenth-century metal drip pot, and by 1900 stovetop pots of one design or another were standard American equipment.