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Central American Coffee Essence
Throughout Central America and Mexico, coffee is not brewed fresh for the table but is made by pouring cold, bottled cooked black coffee into the cup and then adding hot milk to the extract or essence, or hot water for black coffee. Coffee Essence is brewed in any of the common ways, by dripping, percolating or boiling, but about 3 or 4 times as much coffee is used with the same amount of water, making an extract just that much stronger than ours and impossible to drink without diluting.
And once you get used to having your coffee in this handy fashion you'll find it just as good and a whole lot less bother.
This is less a fixed formula than a ratio and a habit: brew a concentrate, bottle it, dilute by the cup. The instructions are workable as given, but the original leaves the numbers loose.
- The working ratioStandard drip coffee runs about 2 level tablespoons of grounds per 6 oz water; three to four times that is 6 to 8 tablespoons per 6 oz. The recipe gives no dilution figure, but an essence that strong would want roughly 1 part essence to 2 or 3 parts hot milk or water in the cup.
- Grind and methodAt that dose a drip cone or percolator will clog or overflow with a fine grind. A coarse grind and a long steep in a French press or a covered pot, then strained through cloth, gives the same strength with far less trouble.
- "Boiling" is not literalOn "boiling" -- Old-style boiled coffee covered a range of practice, from grounds added to water just off the boil and held below a simmer to a genuine rolling boil. The gentler version is safer here: hard boiling draws out bitterness, and bitterness tells more at this concentration.
- StorageThe original assumes a bottle on the shelf. Refrigerate the essence and use it within about a week; coffee concentrate is not sterile and can develop a surface film or mould if left at room temperature in warm weather.
- Hot milk, not coldThe milk or water carries all the heat in the finished cup, since the essence goes in cold. Scald the milk properly, or the drink lands lukewarm.
- YieldA quart of essence made at this strength serves roughly 16 to 20 cups, which is what makes the method worth the initial effort.
Bottled coffee essence was for a long time an ordinary way to take coffee in Mexico and Central America, and the cafe pouring a dark concentrate into a glass and topping it with hot milk is the same gesture that survives today in cafe con leche. The logic is economic as much as culinary: one brewing session serves a household or a roadside stand all day, no fire is needed at the moment of serving, and coffee is not thrown out at the end of a shift. Bottled essences and coffee extracts were also sold commercially in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth century onward, so the concept would not have been unfamiliar to readers.