Army Coffee
Coffee or tea may be made quickly by placing the required quantity of cold water in the pot, and adding the coffee, tied up in a up in a sack of fine gauze, or piece of muslin; bring to boiling point, boil five minutes and serve. Make tea in the same way, except that the tea is put loose in the water, and simply allowed to boil up once.
A field method: coffee grounds bagged in cloth and boiled in the pot, with tea handled the same way but barely brought up to a boil. The proportions are left entirely to the cook.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no proportions. A tablespoon of ground coffee per cup of water is a figure often given in nineteenth-century sources, with more for camp coffee, and about a teaspoon of tea per cup, but the amounts vary from book to book.
- The gauze sackThis is a forerunner of the coffee bag — cheesecloth, doubled, tied loosely so the grounds can swell. Pack it tight and the water never reaches the centre. A large disposable tea filter or a nut-milk bag does the same job.
- Five minutes of boilingThis is the part modern practice has overturned. Boiling extracts bitter compounds and drives off the aromatics; coffee is best held at 195–205F. Steeping the bag off the heat for four to five minutes gives a far cleaner cup with no more work.
- Tea boiled looseBlack tea wants water just off the boil and three to five minutes' steeping; boiling it "up once" is survivable for a strong black tea but will scald green or delicate leaf into bitterness.
- GrindFor any immersion method, a coarse grind. Fine espresso grind will pass straight through gauze and cloud the pot.
- Why the pot mattersEnamelled or steel camp pots impart nothing; a long-used tinned pot with a coffee film inside will make everything taste of yesterday. Scrub between coffee and tea if the same pot serves both.
"Army coffee" carries the memory of the Civil War camps, where coffee was boiled hard in a kettle over an open fire and, on the Confederate side, often was not coffee at all parched rye, chicory, sweet potato and acorn all stood in once the blockade cut off imports. Boiling was a common method before the drip and percolator pots of the later nineteenth century displaced it in town kitchens, and it survived longest exactly where this recipe places it: outdoors, in a single vessel, with no filter but a scrap of muslin. The gauze bag is the one refinement here, a way of getting the grounds out without settling them with eggshell or cold water.