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Frozen Coffee (Six ounces Mocha coffee IO)
Six ounces Mocha coffee, IO ounces Java coffee, 3½ pounds sugar, sufficient water. Mix the coffee, ground, pack in glass percolator, cover tightly, and pour boiling water in 8-ounce lots until 40 ounces of liquid have been obtained. Add sugar and dissolve by agitation. Serve 1 ounce to sherbet glassful of shaved ice, with a spoon. Fruit Acid, 4 ounces; Citric Acid, 8 ounces.
Hot Water Use 1 to 2 ounces to each gallon of fruit flavored syrup.
This is a fountain formula: a concentrated sweetened coffee extract kept in a syrup bottle and dispensed over shaved ice to order. It is written for a dispenser working in fluid ounces and avoirdupois pounds, not for a home cook.
- The typo"IO ounces Java" is 10 ounces — a broken 1 and 0 from the original typesetting. The blend is 6 oz Mocha to 10 oz Java, one pound of ground coffee in total.
- Ounces, two kindsCoffee and sugar are weight; the 8-ounce lots of water and the 40 ounces of finished liquid are fluid ounces. Forty fluid ounces is five cups, drawn from a full pound of grounds — several times the strength of drip coffee, which is the point.
- Mocha and JavaMocha was Yemeni coffee shipped through al-Mokha; Java was Indonesian. Modern beans sold under those names rarely have that origin. A dark, low-acid blend of a fruity natural and a heavier washed bean gets closer than anything labelled "Mocha Java" at a supermarket.
- The percolatorNot a stovetop percolator. A glass percolator here is a straight-sided drip cylinder in which the grounds are packed tight and boiling water is poured through in stages — closer to a large pourover than to anything that recirculates.
- The sugar is the hingeThree and a half pounds — 56 ounces by weight — into 40 fluid ounces of liquid makes a very heavy syrup. "Dissolve by agitation" is easiest while the extract is still hot from the percolator; cold, the sugar goes into solution slowly and you will be shaking the bottle a long time.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 quarts of syrup, at 1 ounce per glass — near 60 servings. A sherbet glass of the period held roughly 5 to 6 ounces, so the ice does most of the volume and the syrup melts down through it.
- The last three sentences are a different formula"Fruit Acid, 4 ounces; Citric Acid, 8 ounces. Hot Water" reads as a separate fountain entry that has run on from a neighbouring formula, an acid solution used at 1 to 2 ounces per gallon of fruit syrup. It has nothing to do with the coffee, and the quantity of hot water is missing.
"Frozen coffee" eaten with a spoon — syrup over shaved ice — was a warm-weather item on the same board as frappés and egg drinks. The Mocha-and-Java pairing named here was the standard American blend of the nineteenth century, generally traced to the two great shipping origins of the trade: Yemeni coffee out of the port of al-Mokha and Dutch colonial coffee from Java. By the time this book was printed the names had already drifted toward describing a style of blend rather than a source, much as they do now. The heavy sugar load is not sweetness for its own sake; syrup at that concentration resists fermentation, which mattered for anything kept in an open fountain jar.