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Coffee (Allow one tablespoonful coffee)
Allow one tablespoonful coffee to each guest and one for the coffee pot. Mix with a small quantity of egg and cold water, let stand for five minutes. Have water in tea kettle boiling and coffee pot hot, then turn on all the water you are going to use. It's the grave of good coffee to add water after it boils or before taking to table. Let boil up and stir down three times, which takes fifteen or twenty minutes . It is well to add a little more coffee for strength.
This is boiled coffee, cleared with egg — the standard American method before drip and percolator equipment took over. The proportions and the ban on adding water later are the useful parts; the boiling time is not.
- The measureOne tablespoon of ground coffee per cup plus one for the pot. A level tablespoon of grounds is roughly 5 g, so this sits on the weak side of the modern ratio of about 10 g to 175 ml of water — which may be why the recipe adds that "it is well to add a little more coffee for strength." "Each guest" means a cup, not a mug, so scale up if your cups are large.
- GrindBoiled coffee wants a coarse grind, close to what a French press takes. Fine or espresso grind will slip past the egg raft and leave grit in every cup.
- The eggA whole egg, or just the white and crushed shell, is stirred into the dry grounds with a little cold water to make a paste. The albumen coagulates in the hot water and traps fines and bitter colloids, which is why old boiled coffee poured clear. One egg is enough for a pot of six to eight cups.
- Fifteen to twenty minutes is far too longExtraction is essentially finished in four to five minutes; after that you are pulling out bitter phenolics and boiling off the aromatics. Bring it just to a boil, pull it off the heat, and give it four minutes before pouring. The three-boil instruction belongs to weak, stale, pre-ground coffee that needed flogging.
- Why no water afterwardThe warning is sound for the wrong reason. Added water dilutes a brew already balanced by evaporation, and fresh water disturbs the settled grounds and egg raft so the pot pours cloudy. Measure all the water in at the start.
- EquipmentAny heavy saucepan or a French press body works; the tall old coffee pot let the sediment settle below the level of the spout. Pour slowly and stop before the last inch.
- YieldAs written, unspecified — it scales with the guest count. Six tablespoons plus one for the pot and six cups of water gives a pot for six.
Egg-cleared boiled coffee was a common American household method through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s print it as a matter of course, sometimes alongside a newer "filtered" or percolator method. Roasted and ground coffee reached ordinary kitchens in packaged form mainly in the later decades of the century; before that households roasted green beans in a skillet or in a rotating roaster over the fire. The blunt line about the grave of good coffee is characteristic of the genre.