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Coffee Boiled
Take one tablespoonful medium ground coffee to a cup, and one for the pot. Draw fresh water from the faucet, boil in kettle for five minutes, pour the water on coffee in pot and allow it to steep for five minutes, then remove the grounds from the liquor, and you can use it several hours afterwards.
A steeping method rather than a true boil, and the instruction not to leave the grounds in is the whole point of it.
- Remove the groundsThe one step that matters: strain the coffee off the grounds after five minutes. Left in the pot, they keep extracting and the brew turns bitter and astringent, which is what "boiled coffee" is usually blamed for.
- RatioOne tablespoon per cup plus one for the pot works out to a little over a tablespoon (roughly 5-6 g) per cup, assuming the 6 oz cup usual in coffee measure; the recipe does not say what size cup it means. That is on the weak side against the commonly cited modern guideline of about 2 tablespoons per 6 oz.
- "Medium ground"For a steep-and-strain method, medium to medium-coarse is right. Anything as fine as espresso grind will slip through cloth or a coarse strainer and keep brewing in the cup.
- Water temperatureThe recipe asks for five minutes at the boil, though it does not say why. Water straight off the boil is a little hot for coffee; letting it stand briefly off the heat before pouring gives a cleaner extraction.
- Fresh water from the faucetThis mattered more than it sounds. Water standing overnight in a lead or galvanised pipe can pick up metal and a flat taste, which is one reason freshly drawn water was specified.
- Holding it several hoursCoffee kept warm for hours goes stale and papery even off the grounds. If you want it later, cool it and reheat gently, or hold it in a vacuum flask rather than over heat.
- StrainingA fine mesh sieve lined with a paper filter or a scalded muslin cloth will separate the liquor from the grounds. Pour steadily rather than pressing the grounds.
Before the electric percolator and the paper drip filter became household fixtures, a great deal of American coffee was made in an open pot on the range, and the argument in nineteenth-century cookbooks was over how to keep the grounds out of the cup and the bitterness out of the brew. Egg shells, a whole beaten egg, cold water dashed in at the end, and cloth bags all appear as clarifying tricks in books of this era. This entry sidesteps all of them by simply steeping and decanting, achieving the same separation of grounds from liquor that a French press manages with a plunger.