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Coffee with Milk, Swiss Style
Grind six light tablespoons roasted coffee beans from the jar (No 3306) and place in an earthen pot. Sprinkle all over a good gill cold water, immediately cover pot and set on one side to infuse for twenty minutes. Pour over three and a half pints fresh, cold milk, mix well with wooden stick, cover pan, set pot on the side of the fire and let very slowly come to just a boiling point, mixing with wooden stick quite frequently meanwhile. Shift pot to corner of range and let settle for three minutes, strain through a clean, dry old linen cloth into a hot pitcher and serve in six "cafe au lait" cups.
A milk-based coffee brewed by infusion rather than by pouring hot coffee into hot milk. The whole method turns on keeping the milk below a rolling boil.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: bring it only to the very edge of a boil -- Milk taken to a full rolling boil scorches on the bottom and throws a skin that carries flavour and fat with it when strained off. Heat gently, stirring, and pull the pot as the surface trembles and the first bubbles break at the edge, which is the "just a boiling point" the recipe asks for.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz, about 120 ml. It is used cold to wet and swell the grounds before the milk goes in; the purpose is even wetting rather than the degassing a modern hot-water bloom achieves.
- QuantitiesThree and a half pints is 7 US cups, roughly 1.65 litres. Six tablespoons of coffee to that much milk is a mild, milk-forward drink by current standards; increase the coffee if you want it to read as coffee rather than as flavoured milk.
- "Six light tablespoons"Light means loosely filled and levelled, not packed or heaped. Grind medium-coarse; anything fine will pass the cloth and settle as silt in the cups.
- No 3306A cross-reference to another numbered entry in the book, for the coffee itself. Any fresh medium roast does the job.
- Earthen pot and wooden stickA glazed earthenware or enamelled pot holds heat evenly and helps prevent scorching; a heavy-based saucepan is the modern equivalent. Why wood rather than metal is not explained here, though it does spare a glazed interior.
- "Side of the fire" and "corner of the range"On a coal range these were the cooler zones. Read them as low heat, then the gentlest residual warmth, off direct heat, for the three-minute settling.
- StrainingA dry linen cloth was the period filter. Use a doubled layer of cheesecloth in a fine sieve, or a paper filter, and warm the pitcher first so the drink does not lose its heat on the way to the table.
- YieldSix large café au lait bowls or cups, about 8 to 9 fl oz each. The drink cools quickly in wide cups, so serve at once.
Café au lait made by steeping ground coffee directly in milk is often said to have been widespread across the Alpine and French-speaking regions in the nineteenth century, where dairy was plentiful and coffee expensive; on that telling the milk both stretched the beans and did the extracting. Filippini's International Cook Book gathered hundreds of such national sketches under one roof for American households and hotel kitchens, and the "Swiss style" tag here may point to the milk-heavy proportion rather than any particular canton's practice. The cold-water soak before the milk goes in is generally understood as a way of wetting grounds evenly so they do not clump and float, and the long, slow rise to the boiling point is essentially a decoction, closer to how coffee was commonly handled before pressure and paper filters arrived. The recipe's insistence on wood and earthenware, and on a dry cloth for straining, suggests a wariness about what metal and damp linen might put into milk.