No. 3702

Turkish Coffee

Cafe a la Turque

To be made with the same proportion of Java as Mocha, ground and passed through a very fine sieve. Put ordinary black coffee in a coffeepot, as many cups as needed, and add for each cup a common coffeespoonful of coffee passed through a sieve, also a lump of sugar; stand it on the fire or gas stove, boil for two minutes, then take it off and pour in a little cold water to settle the coffee; let stand again for a few minutes. Serve powdered sugar with the coffee.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's version of Turkish coffee starts from already-brewed black coffee and fortifies it with a spoonful of powder-fine grounds per cup, which is not how the drink is made in Istanbul or Cairo but does produce something close in body and sediment. A few points make it work.

The grind is the whole recipe"Passed through a very fine sieve" means flour-fine, finer than espresso, so the particles stay suspended and then settle cleanly. A blade grinder will not get there; a burr grinder at its finest setting, or a dedicated Turkish coffee mill, will.
Java and MochaBoth are origin names, not roast styles: Java is Indonesian arabica, Mocha the Yemeni coffee shipped from the port of al-Makha. Equal parts of the two is the old "Mocha-Java" blend, still sold under that name. Any medium-roast arabica blend stands in.
A coffeespoonfulA small spoon, smaller than a teaspoon in most services, so perhaps 2 g of grounds. That is an extra measure of coffee per cup on top of the brewed coffee already in the pot, so the result is strong and thick.
Cups are smallTurkish coffee is served in demitasse, 2 to 3 fl oz. Scaling this to a mug gives a punishing drink and far more sediment than anyone wants.
Two minutes of boilingWatch it rather than time it. The pot will foam up fast once it reaches temperature; pull it at the first rise. Boiling past the foam scorches the grounds and flattens the aroma.
The cold-water trickA splash of cold water drops the suspended grounds to the bottom quickly. It works, and it is worth the few minutes of standing time the recipe asks for. Pour without tipping the last of the pot into the cup.
Sugar, twiceThe lump goes in during boiling, which is how sugar is usually handled in Turkish coffee rather than stirred in at the table. The recipe also has powdered sugar served alongside.
Do not stir the cupLet it sit a moment after pouring and drink down to the sludge, not through it.

A Little History

Ranhofer placed this among the almonds, cheeses and fruit that closed a Delmonico's dinner in The Epicurean (1894), where coffee was the last act rather than a beverage in its own right. Coffee boiled fine-ground in a small long-handled pot, often said to have been sweetened in the pot as well, spread through the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century and reached European cities as a curiosity of the Levant trade; by the 1890s a New York chef could offer it as an exotic finish without explanation. What Ranhofer describes is a hybrid: French-style brewed coffee reinforced with Turkish-fine grounds, closer to what a hotel kitchen could turn out at scale than to the ibrik method itself. The Mocha-Java pairing he calls for was the standard fine blend of the era, named for the two sources that supplied most of the world's coffee before Brazilian production overtook them.