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Filtered Coffee
1 cup finely-ground coffee 6 cups boiling water Put coffee into filter and pour the freshly boiling water over it gradually. Remove strainer before serving. If stronger coffee is desired, use 1½ tablespoons coffee for each cup water, rather than refiltering.
A drip-filter method from an era when most American households still boiled their coffee with the grounds loose in the pot. The quantities are implied rather than stated in full: the base ratio is 1 tablespoon of ground coffee per cup of water, rising to 1½ tablespoons for strong coffee.
- The ratioSix cups of water to about six tablespoons of coffee — if the base ratio was indeed a tablespoon per cup — is weak by current standards, and the "cup" of the period was more likely a 6 oz coffee cup than an 8 oz measure. The 1½ tablespoon version is closer to modern taste; by weight that works out at roughly 45-55 g of coffee per litre, depending on how heaped the spoon is.
- "Freshly boiling"Water straight off a rolling boil pulls out more of the harsh, bitter compounds. Letting the kettle stand off the heat for half a minute or so brings it nearer the 200F that most modern brewers prefer.
- Pour graduallyThis is the instruction that matters. Wet the bed lightly first, wait about thirty seconds for it to swell and release gas, then pour in slow circles so the water stays level with the grounds rather than channelling through them.
- GrindThe recipe does not specify a grind; the commercial grade for drip pots was a medium "drip" cut — coarser than espresso, finer than percolator grind. Anything approaching powder will stall a paper or cloth filter and over-extract.
- The filter itselfThis would have meant a two-part drip pot with a perforated basket, sometimes lined with a cloth or paper disc. A modern pour-over cone or automatic drip machine follows the same principle.
- Remove the strainerMeaning the basket of spent grounds. Leaving it in place lets it drip bitter, over-extracted liquid into the finished pot as it cools.
- Do not refilterRunning brewed coffee back through the same grounds — a way of stretching an expensive commodity, and evidently familiar enough that the recipe warns against it — extracts mainly the bitter tail. The advice still holds.
- YieldAbout six 6 oz cups, or four generous mugs.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was given away by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to its policyholders over several decades, part of a broader welfare-and-education campaign that also produced pamphlets on nutrition, child care and household hygiene. That context explains the tone of this entry: it is not a connoisseur's recipe but a correction of a common domestic habit. Nineteenth-century American coffee was commonly boiled, sometimes at length, and cleared with eggshell or cold water — a method that produced a strong, dark, often bitter drink. Filter and drip pots were in American use well before the late nineteenth century, and household advisers of the period recommended them as the way to get a cleaner cup while using less coffee. The pointed instruction against refiltering shows what the writers were up against in thrifty kitchens where grounds were expected to work twice.