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After-Dinner Coffee
(Black Coffee, or Café Noir) For after-dinner coffee use twice the quantity of coffee, or half the amount of liquid, given in previous recipes. Filtered coffee is often preferred where milk or cream is not
This is less a recipe than a ratio adjustment: Farmer assumes you have already read her entries for boiled and filtered coffee, and simply doubles the strength for the end of the meal. A few notes on what the missing context was.
- Cup sizeAfter-dinner coffee was served in a demitasse, about 2 to 3 oz, though the passage itself says nothing about the cup. Two small cups per person comes to roughly 4 to 6 oz of finished coffee per guest; this is a drink to be sipped, not a mug.
- "Filtered" in 1896This means a drip pot in which near-boiling water passes through the grounds once, as opposed to the era's common practice of boiling grounds in water with egg shell or white to clear them. A modern pour-over cone works on the same principle.
- Why no milk changes the methodBoiled coffee carries sediment and a heavy, slightly bitter body that cream masks. Taken black, those faults are exposed, which may be behind the preference she reports, though she does not say so.
- GrindFor the doubled dose to extract evenly in a filter it wants a medium-fine grind. Too coarse and a strong dose simply tastes thin and sour; too fine and the bed chokes.
- Water temperatureThe book's coffee entries call for boiling water. Modern practice is to take it just off the boil, around 200F, on the grounds that water at a full rolling boil scorches the grounds.
- Halving the liquidFarmer's alternative — same coffee, half the water — is the less reliable of the two. Under-extracted strong coffee tastes sharp rather than deep. Adding coffee is the better route.
Café noir at the close of dinner was a French formality that American hostesses of the 1890s are often said to have taken up: tiny cups, no cream, taken in the drawing room after the table was cleared, often alongside liqueurs and for the men a cigar. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 sits at the point where American coffee-making was shifting from boiling grounds in an open pot — a frontier and household habit that needed egg or fish skin to settle the sediment — toward filtration, which the French had been refining since the late eighteenth century with the biggin and its successors. Her brief note that filtered coffee "is often preferred where milk or cream is not" used is a quiet endorsement of the newer method, and it explains why the entry is so short: everything else the cook needed had already been said a page or two earlier.