Home › The Cook Book › Filtered Coffee
Filtered Coffee
(French or Percolated) 1 cup coffee (finely ground) 6 cups boiling water Various kinds of coffee-pots are on the market for making filtered coffee. They all contain a strainer to hold coffee without allowing grounds to mix with infusion. Some have additional vessel to hold boiling water, upon which coffee-pot may rest. Place coffee in strainer, strainer in coffee-pot, and pot on the range. Add gradually boiling water, and allow it to filter. Cover between additions of water. If desired stronger, re-filter. Serve at once with cut sugar and cream. Put sugar and cream in cup before hot coffee. There will be perceptible difference if cream is added last. If cream is not obtainable, scalded milk may be substituted, or part milk and part cream may be used, if a diluted cup of coffee is desired. Coffee percolators are preferably used when coffee is made at table.
This is drip coffee described before the paper filter reached American kitchens, and the ratio is close to what a modern brewing guide would tell you. A few of the instructions reflect equipment that no longer exists in this form.
- The ratioOne cup of finely ground coffee is roughly 80 g, and six cups of water about 1.4 litres, which works out near 55-60 g per litre — squarely in the modern range for drip. Scale it down to 1/3 cup grounds and 2 cups water for a small pot.
- "Percolated" does not mean a percolator"Percolated" here most likely carries the older, literal sense of water passing down through a bed of grounds — what we would call drip or pour-over. The pumping stovetop percolator that recirculates boiling coffee was already on the market by this date but is a different machine, and many find it gives a harsher cup.
- Water temperatureWater taken straight off a hard boil scorches the grounds and pulls bitter compounds. Let it stand thirty seconds off the heat; 195-205F is the working range.
- Don't re-filterPassing the brew back through the same grounds, as suggested for a stronger cup, extracts the bitter late fractions rather than more of the good ones. Use more coffee instead, or a slower pour.
- "Pot on the range"The pot presumably sat over gentle heat so the brew would not go cold between additions of water; the recipe does not say. Don't leave finished coffee on a burner, though — it stews and turns sour before long. A thermal carafe does the same job properly.
- Cut sugarSugar sold in loaves was cut into cubes at home or by the grocer; cut sugar is simply sugar lumps. Ordinary granulated is fine.
- Cream and scalded milkTable cream of the period was generally lighter than today's heavy whipping cream, nearer light cream or half-and-half. Scalding milk was in part a precaution against souring before pasteurisation was general, and is unnecessary now, though warming it still keeps the coffee hot.
- YieldSix cups of water gives roughly five to six servings after absorption by the grounds.
Fannie Farmer was writing at a moment when American coffee-making was shifting from boiled coffee — grounds thrown into a pot with water, and often an egg or eggshell to settle them — toward filtration, which had been pursued in France from around 1800 with De Belloy's drip pot and its successors. Her heading, "French or Percolated," acknowledges the origin: the filter pot was generally understood in English-speaking kitchens as a French device. The insistence that sugar and cream go into the cup before the coffee is the kind of observation the Boston Cooking School traded in, half chemistry and half table manners; there is some sense to it, since the hot coffee mixes and warms the cold dairy more evenly than pouring cream onto a full cup. Paper filters were still a decade or so away, and the cloth or perforated-metal strainers Farmer describes explain why she calls for a fine grind and for the water to be added gradually.