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Coffee Syrup (One pound fine ground Mocha)
One pound fine ground Mocha and Java coffee, 2 eggs, ½ gallon water. Heat the coffee with a quart of water until it comes to a boil, cool, and put gallon; then add 3/2 through a percolator; add water enough to make ½ gallon; then add 3½ , add 1 ounce of any of pounds loaf sugar, and agitate to solution. To serve, add 1 ounce of any of water, stir, and fill cup with the preceding syrups to a cup ¾ full of boiling rich cream.
The text as printed is badly garbled — lines of type have been transposed, so quantities appear twice and the serving instruction runs backwards. What is described is a heavy sugar-and-coffee syrup for the soda fountain, clarified with egg and served by the ounce into hot water or cream.
- Read the garbled lines in orderReconstructed, the method is: heat 1 lb finely ground coffee with a quart of water until it boils, cool, run it through a percolator, add water enough to make half a gallon, then dissolve 3½ lb loaf sugar in it and agitate until it goes into solution. To serve, put 1 oz syrup in a cup, fill three-quarters with boiling water, stir, and fill the cup with rich cream.
- Where the eggs goThe garbled text never says what the 2 eggs are for; almost certainly they are a clarifier rather than an enrichment. In boiled-coffee practice whole eggs or shells and whites were stirred into the grounds before brewing so the coagulating protein would trap fines and give a bright, sediment-free extract. Modern filter paper does the same job, and the eggs can simply be left out.
- Mocha and JavaNot flavourings. Mocha meant coffee shipped from the Yemeni port of Mokha and Java meant Indonesian beans; the blend of the two was the standard quality coffee of the period. Any medium-to-dark blend works, ground fine as for drip.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in cones or hard blocks, broken up and weighed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight — 3½ lb is about 8 cups.
- The syrup is very heavy3½ lb sugar to half a gallon of coffee is roughly 1.6 kg to 1.9 litres, a heavy fountain syrup though short of saturation. Warm the coffee to dissolve the sugar fully and keep agitating, as the recipe directs.
- Keeping itThere is no preservative beyond the sugar. Refrigerate and use within two weeks, and discard at the first sign of surface mould or fermentation.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts of syrup once the sugar is dissolved. At 1 oz per cup that is roughly ninety-five servings, which tells you this was written for a counter and not a kitchen -- scale it down by a quarter or an eighth.
- Serving hot or coldThe instruction here is for a hot coffee drink built from syrup. The same syrup over ice with soda water and a little cream gives the cold fountain version.
American soda fountains of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ran on bottled syrups: a concentrated flavour base, heavy with sugar, that the dispenser measured by the ounce and finished at the counter with soda water, hot water or cream. Coffee syrup let a druggist sell a hot coffee drink without keeping a brewing pot going, and it kept the fountain's coffee flavour consistent from cup to cup. The egg clarification is older than the fountain — it belongs to the era of boiled coffee, when grounds went straight into the pot and something was needed to settle them, and egg was the usual remedy in American household manuals through the nineteenth century. The Mocha-and-Java blend named here was the period's shorthand for good coffee, and the phrase survived on tins and menus long after the actual trade routes had shifted.