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Crust Coffee
Cut the crusts from slices of Boston brown bread and brown in oven until they are much darker in color, but not burned. Put into saucepan, pour boiling water on them, and let stand covered where they will keep hot for fifteen minutes.
Pour off the liquid into a hot coffee-pot, and serve with sugar and cream. An excellent and wholesome substitute for coffee.
A caffeine-free hot drink built from oven-dried bread crusts. The whole flavour comes from how far you take the browning, so that is where the attention goes.
- How dark is dark enoughThe crusts need to go well past toast, to a deep coffee-brown with dry, brittle edges. Stop short of black: scorched bread turns the drink acrid and bitter in a way sugar will not cover.
- Oven settingNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to brown the crusts in the oven. A moderate 300-325F for 20-30 minutes, turning once, will dry them through rather than just colouring the surface.
- Boston brown breadA steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat flour sweetened with molasses, usually cooked in a can. The molasses is probably much of what gives the drink its vaguely coffee-like character; plain white bread crusts are likely to give a thinner result. Another dark, molasses-sweetened loaf would be the nearest substitute.
- ProportionsNone are given. About one loosely packed cup of browned crusts to a pint of boiling water gives a drink with body; more crusts and it turns to porridge, fewer and it is brown water.
- Steeping, not boilingKeep the pan covered off the heat, or over the barest warmth, for the full fifteen minutes. Boiling breaks the crusts down and you end up straining sludge instead of pouring a clear infusion.
- StrainingPour through a fine sieve or a coffee filter into a warmed pot. The bread will have shed starch and crumbs that make the drink cloudy and slightly slimy if they go into the cup.
- YieldA pint of water makes two modest cups. It does not hold well and should be drunk within the hour; reheated, it tastes of wet bread.
Grain and bread "coffees" run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and European household books, appearing whenever real coffee was expensive, scarce, or thought unsuitable for children and invalids. Roasted barley, rye, chicory, acorns and dried bread crusts all took a turn, and the appeal was that the browning of starches and sugars produces genuinely coffee-like roasted aromas without any caffeine. The logic is thrift: a household that baked its own Boston brown bread, steamed in a can and eaten with baked beans, accumulated dry crusts nobody wanted, and turning them into something to drink used them up. The claim that it is "wholesome" fits a period suspicion of coffee as a stimulant, common in temperance-minded and health-reform writing of the era.