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Boiled Coffee
INGREDIENTS.
1 cup of ground coffee.
1 cup of cold water.
White and shell of 1 egg. 6 cups of boiling water.
1 tablespoonful of ground coffee.
Only the ingredient list survives here; the method for egg-clarified boiled coffee was so standard in period kitchens that many books printed it once and referred back to it. What follows is what the quantities imply and what they mean now.
- What the egg is forThe white and the crushed shell are a clarifying agent, not a flavouring. Beaten into the dry grounds with the cold water, the albumen coagulates as the pot heats and traps fine particles; the shell's calcium carbonate was also said to take the edge off the acidity. The result is a clearer brew than unclarified boiled coffee.
- The cold waterIn the usual period method the cup of cold water is mixed with the grounds and egg before the boiling water goes in. It wets the grounds evenly and keeps the egg from setting into curds on contact with the boiling water.
- TimingPeriod instructions for boiled coffee commonly call for three to five minutes at a boil; longer boiling drives off aromatics and extracts harsher compounds, which is one reason the method is remembered as producing a bitter cup.
- GrindUse a coarse grind, coarser than for a French press. A fine modern grind will pass through the egg raft and give you silt in the cup.
- VesselThis wants a tall enamel or granite-ware coffee pot with a spout, so the grounds can settle below the pour line. A saucepan works but you will need to strain.
- YieldAbout seven cups of liquid before losses to the grounds, so six generous cups served.
Boiled or "egg" coffee was the American standard from the early nineteenth century until percolators and drip cones displaced it, and it survives in Scandinavian-American communities as kokkaffe or church-basement coffee. The egg trick is genuinely old kitchen chemistry, the same clarification used for consommé and for fining wine: coagulating protein sweeps suspended solids out of a liquid.