White Coffee
Is made with coffee that, instead of being browned, is only baked to a slight yellow color and is not ground, or at most the berries are only bruised, and is made with one-half milk and one-half water. It requires twice as much coffee as the ordinary.
For 8 cups take: 2 cupfuls of light baked coffee berries. 4 cupfuls of boiling water. 5 cupfuls of boiling milk.
The berries may have been parched before, but when wanted heat them over again and throw them hot into the boiling water. Close the lid and let stand to draw for half an hour, then add the boiling milk through a strainer. When the milk is first set on to boil, put in a tablespoonful or two of sugar to prevent burning at the bottom. Serve sugar with the coffee as usual, and, if for a party, a spoonful of whipped cream in each cup.
A pale-roast coffee steeped whole in water, then extended with hot milk. The whole point is the underroast: this is not a dark coffee lightened with milk but a drink made from beans taken only to straw color, which gives a thin, nutty, faintly grainy brew rather than anything roasty.
- Sourcing the beansNo supermarket sells coffee at this roast level. Buy green beans from a roaster or online and take them yourself only to a pale yellow-tan, well short of first crack; the book gives no temperature, so go by color rather than the clock and keep the beans moving.
- Whole, not groundThe recipe leaves the berries whole or barely bruised and gives no reason for it. Very lightly roasted beans are hard and dense, and grinding them would likely give a cloudier, more vegetal infusion. A light crack with a rolling pin under a towel is as far as you should go.
- Why twice the coffeePale beans are dense and give up very little soluble material, hence the doubled dose. Two cups of whole beans to four cups of water is not a misprint; reducing it produces hot water with a suggestion of cereal.
- The half hour of steepingThis is a covered off-heat infusion, not boiling. Keep the pan off the burner once the water is on the beans, lid closed, and do not stir; the extraction is slow because the beans are whole.
- Sugar in the milkThe tablespoon or two of sugar going into the milk is a scorch guard. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over moderate heat, stirred, does the same job; note that the recipe itself calls for the milk boiling when it goes in.
- YieldFour cups of water plus five of milk gives nine cups of liquid, and the beans absorb some, so eight servings of about a cup each is right. Strain the infusion as well as the milk if any bean fragments are loose.
- ServingSweeten at the table and add whipped cream only for a party, as written. The drink is pale beige and mild; anyone expecting the strength of a dark roast will find it closer to a milky barley infusion.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is one likely reason a coffee recipe appears among the pastry work. This entry describes the narrower sense of "white coffee," in which the beans themselves are only lightly baked, rather than simply coffee served with a large proportion of milk. Underroasting was familiar to cooks who parched their own green coffee at home, when roast color was a matter of judgment rather than a label on a bag. Pale-roast traditions survive elsewhere -- the Yemeni and Levantine white coffees, and the Ipoh style of Malaysia -- though the connection between those and this American recipe is assumed rather than documented.