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Finished Coffee
Pack ½ pound of pulverized coffee in a percolator. Percolate with 2 quarts of boiling water, letting it run through twice. Add to this 2 quarts of milk, keep hot in an urn, and draw as a finished drink. After you have filled cup with this coffee, add a lump of sugar, and top with whipped cream. Coffee as a Finished Drink.
Pack ½ pound pulverized coffee in a percolator. Percolate with 2 quarts of boiling water, letting it run through twice. Add to this 2 quarts of milk, keep hot in an urn, and draw as a finished drink. After you have filled cup with this coffee, add a lump of sugar, and top with whipped cream.
This is fountain-scale batch coffee: a strong double-passed extract cut with an equal volume of milk and held hot for service. Everything about it is built around drawing dozens of identical cups from a tap rather than brewing to order.
- The hinge: do not boil the milkOnce the milk goes in, the urn should hold at roughly 150-160F, hot enough to serve and to stay out of the bacterial danger zone, but never simmering. Milk held at a boil skins over, scorches on the urn wall, and turns the whole batch sulphurous.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of coffee is 8 oz or about 225 g; 2 quarts is 1.9 L of water and the same again of milk, giving roughly a gallon, or sixteen 8 oz cups. Scaled down for a household pot, that is 1 oz (28 g) coffee per cup of water, then diluted 1:1 with milk.
- "Pulverized coffee"Fountain trade usage for a fine, near-powdery grind, not espresso-fine but well below modern drip. In a stovetop or electric percolator that grind will clog the basket and pass fines into the pot; a medium grind behaves better, and the extract will still be strong at this dose.
- Running it through twicePassing the liquid over the grounds again would build a stronger base without adding coffee. The second pass draws more heavily on already-extracted grounds, so it tends to bring bitterness with it; at this coffee-to-water ratio a single pass will already give a very strong extract.
- The urnA soda-fountain urn was typically a jacketed vessel, the coffee heated indirectly by steam or a surrounding water bath rather than sitting over the heat itself. A modern insulated airpot or a low water bath is the nearest equivalent.
- Holding timeMilk-diluted coffee held hot degrades fast. Plan on serving within about an hour, and discard rather than reheat.
- FinishingA "lump" of sugar is a cube, on the order of 3-4 g, roughly a level teaspoon. The recipe does not specify how the cream is whipped or whether it is sweetened.
A "finished drink" was fountain shorthand for anything premixed and drawn ready to serve, as against a beverage assembled glass by glass in front of the customer. That this book gives the same instructions twice under two headings may well be a transcription or typesetting artifact of the page. The percolator was, by most accounts, the fashionable brewing device of the early twentieth century, promoted by manufacturers of both stovetop and the new electric models, and its habit of recirculating boiling liquid over the grounds is what this formula appears to exploit. Coffee with hot milk and whipped cream is generally said to have been a staple of the American drugstore fountain in the years around Prohibition, when soda counters are often described as expanding into the trade the closed saloons left behind.