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Filtered Coffee
The coffee should be ground as fine as the mill will make it. Allow one-half cup of the ground coffee to one generous quart of water; this makes sufficient for five cups of coffee . Place the coffee in the cloth or strainer in the top of the pot, arranged for the purpose, pour the boiling water upon it, and set the pot back, allowing the water to filter slowly through. When it is all through, set the pot over the heat, and when the coffee is just at the bubbling point, pour it out, and at once return it to the top of the pot to filter once more. Do this still again, making three times in all that the water has been poured upon the coffee; and serve at once . This produces a clear, bright coffee and requires at the most, not longer than five minutes in the making, if the heat is properly brisk. Coffee should be served as soon as made, or the bright flavor will be lost.
A cloth-filter drip method, written for a two-chamber pot with a flannel bag or perforated strainer in the top. Everything here works in modern equipment, with one large caveat about the triple pour.
- The triple pour is the thing to reconsiderPassing the same liquid through the grounds three times, with a reheat between each, will over-extract by the second pass, pulling bitter, astringent compounds and driving off the aromatics the last line of the recipe is trying to protect. A single slow pour through a fine grind gives the clear, bright cup the author is after.
- Never let it bubble"Just at the bubbling point" is the outer limit, not a target. Coffee held at or above a simmer quickly turns flat and harsh. Hold brewed coffee at 175-185F if you must hold it at all.
- Water temperatureThe recipe calls for boiling water. In modern practice, let a full boil settle for thirty seconds or so; 195-205F is the working range for extraction.
- Grind"As fine as the mill will make it" should not be read as espresso-fine, which will choke a cloth or paper filter and stall the drip.
- The ratioHalf a cup of ground coffee is roughly 40-45 g, against a quart of about 950 ml, or about 1:22. That is on the weak side of modern specialty practice, which usually runs nearer 1:15 to 1:18.
- The cloth filterA flannel or muslin sock filter must be rinsed in hot water after every use, never soaped, and stored wet in the refrigerator or it goes rancid and taints the next pot. A paper cone or a metal mesh basket avoids the upkeep, though each gives a somewhat different cup.
- Yield"Five cups" means period coffee cups of about 5 to 6 fluid ounces. In modern mugs, expect three, perhaps three and a half.
Drip or filter pots of this type are traditionally associated with the two-chamber cafetière of Jean-Baptiste de Belloy in France around the turn of the nineteenth century, in which hot water passes down through grounds held in a perforated or cloth-lined upper compartment rather than boiling with them. By the later nineteenth century American households used both boiled coffee, often cleared with egg shell or white, and filter and percolator pots, which domestic-science writers of the period championed as cleaner and less wasteful. The insistence on speed, on serving at once, and on not letting the pot boil is consistent with that reforming school.