No. 3701

How to Make Coffee

Maniere de Faire le Cafe

The best-known coffee-pot is the one with a filter, of which a design is shown (Fig. 762). They are to be had of various sizes and more or less luxurious. To obtain a limpid infusion quickly place the ground coffee in the cylinder on top of the coffee-pot, then put in the strainer on top of the coffee, press it down and pour boiling water over so that the infusion runs slowly down into the pot. While the infusion filters the coffee-pot should be kept in a vessel containing hot water to the depth of two fingers so that the infusion attains the same degree of heat without allowing it to boil. For the sake of economy, after the infusion is made, the grounds can be boiled up once more and an infusion prepared with it to take the place of plain water, but, in order to obtain a good result, the grounds must first settle, then the water be poured off, strained and heated to boiling point. In this way less coffee can be used without deteriorating from its excellence. Use one and a half pounds of Java coffee, a pound and a half of Maracaibo, one pound of Mocha and seven gallons of water. The best way to obtain good coffee is to make it only when required; the maxim should be "little and often." It takes three kinds of coffee to obtain a good result; for instance, Mocha for the aroma, having it only slightly roasted, Maracaibo for the color, which should be well roasted, and Java for the strength, roasted to a degree between the other two.

← No. 3700 Chocolate Salted Almonds, Cheeses & Fresh Fruits No. 3702 Turkish Coffee →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is describing a French drip pot for banquet-scale service, and most of what he says still holds. Two things need translating: the quantities, which are for a hotel dining room, and the roast-and-blend language, which no longer maps onto what is sold today.

Never let it boilThis is the hinge of the whole entry. The pot sits in a shallow water bath so the brew stays hot without simmering; boiled coffee turns bitter and flat because volatile aromatics are driven off. A modern equivalent is a warming plate or a preheated insulated carafe, held below about 185F.
The quantities are institutionalFour pounds of coffee to seven gallons of water yields about 110 cups at eight ounces, and half again as many if poured smaller. That works out near 68 g of coffee per litre of water, a touch stronger than the modern standard of roughly 55-60 g/L, so the ratio itself is sound.
Scaling the blendBy weight the blend is 37.5 percent Java, 37.5 percent Maracaibo, 25 percent Mocha. For a single litre that is about 26 g Java, 26 g Maracaibo, 16 g Mocha.
Water temperatureThe recipe says to pour boiling water over the grounds; what it forbids is boiling the finished infusion. Modern practice is water just off the boil: let a kettle stand thirty seconds to a minute and you land at 195-205F, which is where extraction behaves.
The coffee namesMocha meant coffee shipped through the Yemeni port of that name, usually Yemeni or Ethiopian; Maracaibo was named for the Venezuelan port it shipped from; Java was Indonesian. None of the three is reliably the same product today. Substitute by role rather than name: a fruity, lightly roasted Ethiopian for aroma, a darker-roasted body for color, a medium-roasted Sumatran or Javanese for strength.
The "filter" potFig. 762 is a French drip pot, not a percolator and not an espresso machine. The upper cylinder holds the grounds under a perforated press plate and water passes through once by gravity. A pour-over cone is the nearest modern equivalent.
Skip the second infusionReusing settled grounds to make brewing liquor for the next batch was a real economy in a house going through pounds a day, but spent grounds give up mostly bitter, astringent compounds and stale coffee oils. The instruction to make it "little and often" is the part worth keeping.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, which is why a note on coffee is written for seven gallons at a time and appears in a chapter alongside salted almonds, cheeses and fruit: this is the end of a long service, not breakfast. The insistence on blending three origins for aroma, color and strength was standard trade doctrine among nineteenth-century importers and roasters, and depended on named shipping ports rather than farms or varieties, so a "Mocha" was defined by the harbour it left from. The pot Ranhofer illustrates belongs to the family of French drip pots generally traced to the early 1800s and often credited to Descroizilles, a Rouen chemist and pharmacist, or to de Belloy, archbishop of Paris, though the attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented. His warning against boiling marks a real shift in taste: the American norm through much of the century was coffee boiled with the grounds, sometimes cleared with egg shell, and the filter pot was the refined alternative.