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Coffee
Miss Riley.
The following is a delicious dish either for summer breakfast or dessert : Make a strong infusion of mocha coffee; put it in a porcelain bowl, sugar it properly and add to it an equal portion of boiled milk, or one-third the quantity of a rich cream. Surround the bowl with pounded ice.
ROASTING COFFEE. - This process should be carefully watched and superintended. When the berry crackles and becomes crisp it is sufficiently roasted. Once taken off the roaster, it should be placed in several thick folds of flannel, to preserve the oil and aroma. When cool, place it in an air-tight cannister.
Two things in one entry: a chilled sweetened coffee-and-milk for hot mornings, and a note on roasting your own green beans, which in the 1870s most households still did. Both work, with a few translations.
- "Mocha coffee"Not chocolate. Mocha was the Yemeni port that shipped the beans, and the name came to mean a particular winy, fruity coffee. Any good single-origin Ethiopian or Yemeni bean gives the intended character; a medium-roast Latin American coffee will taste flatter but is fine.
- "Strong infusion"Roughly double-strength brewed coffee — about 1:8 coffee to water by weight rather than the usual 1:16. It has to be strong because milk and melting ice will both soften it.
- Sugar it while hotThis is the one step worth respecting. Sugar dissolves properly in the hot infusion and will not settle out once the drink is cold; stirring it into a chilled cup leaves grit at the bottom.
- The proportionsEqual parts coffee and boiled milk, or coffee plus one-third its volume of cream. The recipe does not say why the milk is boiled; scalding would have helped milk keep in a pre-refrigeration kitchen, and it also alters the flavour. With pasteurised milk you can skip the boiling, though a brief scald does mellow the flavour slightly.
- "Surround the bowl with pounded ice"An ice bath, not ice in the drink — the point is to chill without dilution. A bowl set in ice and water, stirred occasionally, cools in fifteen to twenty minutes; a few hours in the refrigerator does the same job.
- Porcelain, and whyCoffee is acidic and will pick up metallic flavours from tin or unlined copper. Porcelain, glass or stainless steel all serve.
- Reading the roastThe crackle described is what roasters now call first crack, at roughly 385-400F, which lands you at a light roast. Beans continue to darken from residual heat after they leave the pan, so pull them a shade early and cool them fast — spreading on a tray or tossing between two colanders works better than the flannel.
- The airtight canisterFresh-roasted coffee outgasses carbon dioxide for a day or two. A truly sealed container will pressurise; use a one-way valve bag or leave the lid loose for 24 hours, then seal. Whole beans keep their aroma for a couple of weeks at best, which is why the original insists on care.
- YieldNot stated. A cup of strong infusion with a cup of milk serves two as a breakfast drink, or four as a small dessert cup.
Iced coffee with milk was a genteel summer novelty in North American households of the 1870s, when ice was newly cheap and reliable — the commercial ice trade, cut from northern lakes and stored in insulated houses, put pounded ice within reach of any town kitchen with an icebox. In the method here, the ice never touches the coffee. The roasting note reflects the other half of the period's coffee economy. Packaged roasted coffee was already being sold commercially, but home roasting of green beans in a covered pan or a hand-cranked drum over the stove was still common, which is why the book bothers to describe what a properly roasted bean sounds like. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from contributions by named local women, and the attribution to Miss Riley is typical of the form — a community cookbook assembled as a charity fundraiser, one signed receipt at a time.