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Coffee for One Hundred
Take five pounds roasted coffee, grind and mix with six eggs; make small muslin sacks, and in each place a pint of coffee , leaving room for it to swell; put five gallons boiling water in a large coffee urn or boiler having a faucet at the bottom; put in part of the sacks and boil two hours; five or ten minutes before serving raise the lid and add one or two more sacks, and if you continue serving several times add fresh sacks at regular intervals, taking out from time to time those first put in and filling up with boiling water as needed. In this way the full strength of the coffee is secured and the fresh supplies impart that delicious flavor consequent on a few moments boiling.
To make coffee for twenty persons, use one and a half pints ground coffee and one gallon of water. - Mrs. C. S. Ogden .
A church-supper method: coffee held in cloth bags and steeped in a faucet urn so the pot never has to be emptied and restarted. The technique still works, but the two-hour boil is the part to ignore.
- The two-hour boilCoffee held at a rolling boil for two hours turns harsh and flat — the aromatics drive off in the first few minutes and the remaining extraction is all bitterness. The recipe half-admits this by adding fresh sacks at the end for flavor. Hold the water at 195-205F and steep each sack four to six minutes, then lift it out.
- ProportionsFive pounds to five gallons is one pound per gallon, roughly double current filter-coffee strength (about 8 oz of grounds per gallon). The second formula given — a pint and a half of grounds to a gallon — works out closer to 8-9 oz per gallon, since a pint of ground coffee weighs about 5 to 6 oz. The two ratios in the recipe do not agree; the smaller one is the sounder guide.
- Sacks and quantitiesA pint of grounds per sack means roughly fifteen sacks from five pounds. Unbleached muslin, boiled first to remove sizing, or large disposable filter-paper brew bags. Fill them no more than two-thirds — wet grounds swell considerably and a tight bag extracts unevenly.
- The eggsSix eggs mixed whole into the grounds is old-style egg coffee: the proteins coagulate in the hot water and bind the fines and some bitter compounds, leaving the brew clear. Shells crushed in with them help. The eggs are fully cooked in the process; they are a clarifier, not a flavoring.
- GrindUse a coarse grind, as for a French press. Fine grounds sift through muslin and cloud the urn, and they over-extract badly at these temperatures.
- The urn"A large coffee urn or boiler having a faucet at the bottom" is a five-gallon stockpot with a spigot, or a modern commercial coffee urn used as a hot-water reservoir with the brew basket removed. Whatever the vessel, five gallons of near-boiling liquid weighs over forty pounds — set it where it will not be moved.
- YieldFive gallons is eighty cups at 8 oz, so "one hundred" assumes small cups and no refills. Reckon on a gallon per twenty people, as the closing line does.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of late nineteenth-century American compilations built from contributed household recipes, each signed by the woman who sent it in — here Mrs. C. S. Ogden. Quantity recipes like this one existed for church socials, fairs, camp meetings and political barbecues, occasions where a hundred people had to be fed from equipment no larger than a laundry boiler. The cloth bag does the work later done by the urn basket and the modern brew pouch: it let a cook keep a single body of hot water going all afternoon, pulling spent grounds and dropping in fresh without ever straining or decanting. Clarifying coffee with egg is older still and appears repeatedly in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, before fine-mesh and paper filtration made it unnecessary; it survives as a regional tradition in Scandinavian-American church kitchens in the upper Midwest, where boiled egg coffee is still served.