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After-Dinner Coffee
The best after-dinner coffee is made with a filter. If really black coffee is desired, use two heaping tablespoons of finely ground coffee to each large coffee -cup of freshly boiled water. Wet the strainer in cold water before adding the coffee, pour the boiling water slowly upon the coffee, and leave the pot over the heat while the water is finding its way through the fine grains and absorbing their flavor. When all the liquid has dripped through, the coffee is done and should be served at once. CAFÉ BRÛLÉ-Make strong after-dinner coffee. When serving pass French brandy and cut sugar. Two pieces should be allowed for each small cup, as coffee should be quite sweet when served with brandy. One piece of sugar should be placed in the cup and the other in the spoon. Fill spoon with brandy and light. When the sugar has dissolved and the brandy somewhat burned away, blow out the flame, put the spoon and contents into the cup of coffee and drink.
Another method is to serve a tiny glass of brandy with each cup of coffee. The coffee is sweetened, the brandy poured on the surface and lighted. When the brandy is nearly burned away , blow out the flame and drink the coffee.
Two recipes in one: a drip-filter method for strong demitasse coffee, and the flamed-brandy service built on it. The whole thing depends on the coffee being small, strong and hot.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe pot sits over heat only to keep the water and the brew hot while it drips, not to cook it. Coffee held at or above a simmer turns bitter and flat within minutes, which is why the original says serve at once.
- "Large coffee-cup" of waterProbably somewhere in the region of 6 to 8 fluid ounces. Two heaping tablespoons of fine grind to that volume gives a brew well above ordinary breakfast strength, which is the point: the second half of the recipe speaks of small cups, not a breakfast mug.
- The filterA period drip pot with a perforated metal strainer, sometimes lined with cloth. Wetting it first may have helped seat cloth or flannel against the metal and keep grounds from riding up the sides; with modern paper it also rinses away papery flavor.
- Grind"Finely ground" here means finer than drip but not espresso-fine. Too fine and a gravity drip pot stalls or over-extracts; aim for something close to a fine filter grind and pour in stages.
- Pour slowlyThe instruction is doing real work. A single fast pour channels through the bed and gives weak, uneven coffee; adding the boiling water in a slow stream keeps the grounds saturated evenly.
- Cut sugarLoaf sugar broken or nipped into rough cubes. Two pieces per demitasse is about two modern sugar cubes, or two level teaspoons.
- French brandyAny Cognac or brandy at around 40% alcohol. Much below that it may not light readily, especially unwarmed; well above 50% it burns hotter and faster and is harder to control.
- Burning brandy at the tableA spoonful of lit spirit gives a nearly invisible blue flame. Light it away from the bottle, never pour from a bottle toward a flame, and keep a saucer or lid handy to smother it rather than blowing at a cup of hot liquid.
After-dinner coffee in an American book of this period means the French service: a small cup, taken black and strong at the table or in the drawing room, quite distinct from the weak boiled coffee of the breakfast pot. The filter pot the recipe assumes is the café filtre apparatus that spread from France through the nineteenth century, in which hot water passes once through the grounds by gravity rather than being boiled with them. Café brûlé, "burnt coffee," is the flamed version, and it is generally traced in the United States to Creole New Orleans, where the more elaborate café brûlot was set alight with citrus peel and spices in a chafing bowl. The Butterick book gives the plain domestic form of it, a spoon and a lump of sugar, which is about as much theater as a household dining room could manage. That it appears here under Pickles and Catsups is an artifact of how these compilations were assembled rather than any culinary logic.