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Filtered Coffee
INGREDIENTS. ½ a cup of coffee, ground very fine. 3 cups of boiling water.
About 6 blocks of sugar. -J. M. L.
About 3 tablespoonfuls of cream.
About 6 tablespoonfuls of hot milk.
Method. Put the coffee into the filter of a wellscalded coffee-pot. Pour the boiling water over the coffee. Serve as soon as the infusion has dripped through the filter. For black coffee use double the quantity of coffee.
A drip-pot method from the era when "filtered" meant a two-chamber pot with a perforated middle, not paper. The proportions are strong by modern American habit and closer to what you would brew today for a small pour-over.
- The ratioHalf a cup of finely ground coffee to three cups of boiling water is roughly 40 g to 700 ml, in the same neighbourhood as the usual modern 1:16 by weight. The cream and hot milk are listed among the ingredients, though the recipe qualifies both with "about."
- "Blocks of sugar"Cube or lump sugar, sold pressed into small blocks and served with tongs. Six blocks is about two tablespoons of granulated sugar spread across the whole pot.
- The coffee-potA period filter pot is a biggin or French drip pot: an upper chamber with a fine perforated metal plate holding the grounds, sitting over the serving pot. A modern pour-over cone or a full-immersion setup will do the same work; the grind should be finer than for a press but not espresso-fine, or the drip stalls.
- Scalding the potThis is the instruction that actually changes the cup. Rinsing the pot and filter with boiling water first keeps the brew from dropping below extraction temperature on contact with cold metal, and rinses out stale coffee oils, which turn rancid quickly in tin and enamel.
- Water temperatureThe recipe says boiling water. Modern practice is to let a kettle stand off the heat briefly before pouring onto fine grounds, on the grounds that water at a full boil over-extracts and tastes bitter.
- Serve at onceThe direction to serve as soon as it has dripped through is not politeness. Coffee held on a stove or reheated goes flat and bitter within minutes, which is why period books repeat the warning so often.
- Black coffeeThe recipe simply doubles the coffee for black service, giving a much more concentrated brew; period 'black coffee' was commonly taken in small cups, though this recipe does not say so.
- YieldThree cups of water, so slightly under three cups of brewed coffee once the grounds have absorbed their share, plus the three tablespoons of cream and six of hot milk. The recipe gives no number of servings.
Filtered coffee entered English and American households in the nineteenth century by way of France, where drip pots offered an alternative to the older practice of boiling grounds loose in water and settling them with eggshell or cold water; boiled coffee remained standard in American households well into the twentieth century. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s make a point of the distinction: boiled coffee was cheap and forgiving, filtered coffee was the refined method, and a good many domestic writers treated the choice as a marker of a well-run table. The initials "J. M. L." attached to the sugar quantity may be a contributor credit of the sort these compiled household books carried, one woman's proportions preserved inside someone else's collection.