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Filtered Coffee
Allow seven tablespoonfuls of very finely ground coffee to one pint of water. Have the water boiling and pour it slowly over the coffee. Have the pot in a pan of boiling water, that it may keep very hot without danger of boiling.
A drip-pot method from the era just before paper filters. The technique translates directly to a modern pour-over cone, with two caveats about temperature.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe pan of boiling water is a bain-marie meant to hold the brewed coffee near serving temperature without cooking it. Coffee held at or above a simmer soon turns bitter and flat as aromatics drive off. A vacuum carafe does the same job better.
- RatioSeven tablespoons of ground coffee is roughly 35-40 g; a US pint is 473 ml. That works out somewhere between 1:12 and 1:13.5, stronger than the 1:15 to 1:17 usual now. If it reads harsh, drop to five tablespoons.
- "Very finely ground"Probably fine in the sense of a drip pot rather than an espresso grind: closer to table salt than to powder. In a paper cone, go to medium-fine; a true fine grind will stall the bed and over-extract.
- Water temperature"Have the water boiling" means fresh water off a rolling boil. Let it stand 30 seconds off the heat, to about 200F, before pouring.
- Pour slowlyWet the grounds with a little water first, wait half a minute for the bed to swell and release carbon dioxide, then continue in a steady spiral. Total contact time of three to four minutes.
- The vesselA "filtered coffee" pot of this period was typically a two-chamber French drip pot with a metal strainer rather than a paper filter, though the recipe does not say. A cone with paper or a cloth sock gives a cleaner cup; a fine metal mesh is closest to the original.
- YieldOne pint makes two generous cups. Scale by keeping three and a half tablespoons of coffee to each cup of water.
Filtered or drip coffee arrived in American cookbooks as the refined alternative to the boiled coffee of the frontier kitchen, where grounds were tipped straight into the kettle and settled with eggshell or cold water. The drip pot itself is generally traced to late eighteenth-century France and the biggin, a two-chamber pot in which hot water percolated down through a metal-plated bed of grounds; by 1900 versions were sold widely in the United States, and household writers pressed them because they avoided the bitterness of boiling. The instruction to stand the pot in a pan of boiling water reflects the practical problem of the period: with no thermos and a coal range that ran hot, keeping coffee drinkable without cooking it took deliberate effort. Paper filtration, credited to Melitta Bentz in Dresden in 1908, would soon make the method simpler than this recipe assumes.