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To Make After-Dinner Coffee
Take six light tablespoons roasted coffee beans from jar and grind in mill, Neither too fine nor too coarse. Have a thoroughly clean, small French coffee pot and thoroughly scald with boiling water just a minute before time of making the coffee, arrange a piece of dry, clean, old linen cloth around the section of pot and filter to insure perfect clarification. Place the ground coffee on filter and pour over a pint and a half thoroughly (fresh) boiling water little by little. When water is poured over place cover on, being very careful that on no account does it boil. Keep on corner of range or, better still, in a pan of boiling water up to height of three inches on coffee pot until coffee is filtered, then serve in six after-dinner cups. Coffee should never be made more than three or four minutes before time to serve. ANOTHER MODE OF MAKING EXCELLENT AFTER-DINNER COFFEE Have a rather small ordinary earthen (clay) pot or enamelled pan. Grind in coffee mill six light tablespoons roasted coffee and place in pan, measure out one and a half pints cold fresh water, carefully sprinkle a gill (only) of it all over coffee, immediately put cover on, let infuse in a cool place for twenty minutes, then pour in balance of cold water (five gills). Mix well with a clean wooden stick, cover, then set pan on the side of the fire and let very slowly come just to a boiling point. On no account allow it to boil, being careful to mix with wooden stick two or three times only while heating up and to immediately replace cover each time. Remove from range, let settle for two minutes, arrange a piece of clean, dry old linen or muslin cloth over a hot serving coffee pot, pour coffee over, and when all strained immediately serve in six after-dinner cups.
Two methods for demitasse coffee: a cloth-filtered drip and a cold-bloom infusion finished just below the boil. Both hinge on the same rule the author repeats twice.
- Never let it boilThis is the whole instruction. Water above about 205F strips harsh, bitter compounds out of the grounds and drives off the aromatics; in the second method the coffee is heated only until it is on the point of moving. Pull it off the heat before any bubble breaks the surface.
- MeasuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so "a gill only" to bloom and "five gills" to finish equals 1/2 cup plus 2 1/2 cups, the pint and a half called for. Six "light" tablespoons of ground coffee is roughly 30 g, which is a lean ratio for 24 oz of water by current practice; increase the coffee if you want a stronger cup.
- A French coffee potNot a press pot, which did not yet exist in the modern form. It means a two-chamber drip or biggin pot: grounds sit in a perforated upper section and hot water passes through into the pot below. A pourover cone over a warmed carafe behaves the same way.
- The linen clothA cloth filter gives a clean cup without paper's absorption of oils. The book specifies a dry cloth; many cloth-filter users prefer to rinse it in boiling water and use it damp. Store it wet in the refrigerator or boil it between uses; a stale cloth filter turns rancid quickly.
- Holding temperature"Corner of the range" means the coolest spot on a coal or wood stove. The pan of boiling water three inches up the pot is a water bath, which cannot exceed 212F and keeps the brew from stalling as it drips. On an electric or gas hob, the water bath is the reliable version.
- Water"Thoroughly fresh boiling water" poured little by little arrives on the grounds a few degrees below the boil, which is about right at 200F. Draw the water cold and heat it once; water held simmering loses dissolved gas and tastes flat.
- YieldAn after-dinner cup is a demitasse of 2 to 3 oz, so a pint and a half is generous for six even after absorption by the grounds and the cloth. Expect closer to eight small cups from the first method, and serve within the three or four minutes the author allows.
"After-dinner coffee" in an old cookbook means the French service: a small strong cup, taken black, away from the table, and drunk soon after brewing rather than kept warm on the stove all evening. The drip pot described here descends from the filter pots that spread through France after about 1800 and are generally credited to Jean-Baptiste de Belloy, whose design put the grounds above the water instead of boiling the two together. The linen or muslin cloth is older still, and survives today in the Latin American manga or coffee sock and in Vietnamese and Malaysian sock-brewed coffee. The second method, blooming the grounds with a little cold water and then bringing the pot slowly toward a boil it must never reach, belongs to the same nineteenth-century argument that produced all these devices: no two households agreed on how best to keep coffee from being spoiled in the making.