Just a Cup of Coffee, Please
Ah, the daily cup of coffee. I'm one of those disgusting people who wakes up readily and cheerfully without the intervention of caffeine, but having watched friends, college roommates, some family members and my spouse stumble around only semi-coherent before their morning cup, I know how important it is for most other people.
The caffeine-dependent who live in the 21st century have it easy. Technology is kind to them: the modern coffee pot is designed so that even the drowsiest individual can successfully produce drinkable coffee in the morning with a minimum of effort -- or no effort at all, if your pot has a timer and you remember to set it up the night before. Back in the day, though, making coffee involved a bit more effort.
Let's start with the ever-reliable Marion Harland, whose instructions for an 1875 pot of java are every bit as detailed as you would expect from a Victorian homemaker:
Never buy ground coffee if you can get any other. The mere fact that after they have gone to the expense of the machinery and labor requisite for grinding it, the manufacturers can sell it cheaper per pound than grocers can the whole grains, roasted or raw, should convince every sensible person that it is adulterated with other and less expensive substances. Be that as it may, coffee loses its aroma so rapidly after it is ground that it is worth your while to buy it whole, either in small quantities freshly roasted, or raw, and roast it yourself. You can roast in a pan in the oven, stirring every few minutes, or in the same upon the top of the range. Stir often and roast quickly to a bright brown -- not a dull black. While still hot, beat up the white of an egg with a tablespoonful of melted butter and stir up well with it. This will tend to preserve the flavor. Grind just enough at a time for a single making.
To Make Coffee (boiled)
1 full coffee-cup (1/2 pint) of ground coffee
1 quart of boiling water
White of an egg, and crushed shell of same
1/2 cup of cold water to settle it
Stir up the eggshell and the white (beaten) with the coffee and a very little cold water, and mix gradually with the boiling water in the coffee-boiler. Stir from the sides and top as it boils up. Boil pretty fast twelve minutes; pour in the cold water and take from the fire, setting gently upon the hearth to settle. In five minutes, pour it off carefully into your silver, china, or Britannia coffee-pot, which should be previously well scalded.
Send to table hot.
When I first read this, I thought the eggshell and egg white were odd additions to coffee. But then I started noticing that all my older cookbooks called for them when making boiled coffee. A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband: With Bettina's Best Recipes, published around 1917, gives similar instructions except that it doesn't mention eggshells, just the whites. All three of my editions of the Metropolitan Cook Book, ca. 1925, ca. 1943, and 1957, mention either eggshells or egg whites, or both. The seventh edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1941) has "1 egg or 3 eggshells" in the ingredients list -- but then directs you to add both of them in making the coffee.
All of these books give directions for other ways to make coffee, too. Even in 1875, Mrs. Harland was able to comment that "There are so many patent coffee-pots for this purpose, and the directions sold with them are so minute, that I need give only a few general rules here." But when it comes to boiled coffee, the egg and/or eggshells always appear. I suspected that I knew why: the egg would congeal around the coffee grounds and settle with them to the bottom of the pot, keeping the drink itself from being muddy and full of grounds. Still, it wasn't until the twelfth edition of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (by now re-named The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 1979) that I found my guess confirmed: the recipe there for "Boiled Coffee", given as a kind of quaint survival from earlier times that people might want to try while camping, says that "Some outdoorsmen crack an egg and mix it, crumpled-up shell and all, into the coffee grounds before pouring on the water. It helps the grounds to settle."
So, there you have it. If your Mr. Coffee dies one morning before producing anything drinkable, don't despair! A saucepan, some coffee, cold water and an egg can save the day.
Assuming you're awake enough to cope with them.
The caffeine-dependent who live in the 21st century have it easy. Technology is kind to them: the modern coffee pot is designed so that even the drowsiest individual can successfully produce drinkable coffee in the morning with a minimum of effort -- or no effort at all, if your pot has a timer and you remember to set it up the night before. Back in the day, though, making coffee involved a bit more effort.
Let's start with the ever-reliable Marion Harland, whose instructions for an 1875 pot of java are every bit as detailed as you would expect from a Victorian homemaker:
Never buy ground coffee if you can get any other. The mere fact that after they have gone to the expense of the machinery and labor requisite for grinding it, the manufacturers can sell it cheaper per pound than grocers can the whole grains, roasted or raw, should convince every sensible person that it is adulterated with other and less expensive substances. Be that as it may, coffee loses its aroma so rapidly after it is ground that it is worth your while to buy it whole, either in small quantities freshly roasted, or raw, and roast it yourself. You can roast in a pan in the oven, stirring every few minutes, or in the same upon the top of the range. Stir often and roast quickly to a bright brown -- not a dull black. While still hot, beat up the white of an egg with a tablespoonful of melted butter and stir up well with it. This will tend to preserve the flavor. Grind just enough at a time for a single making.
To Make Coffee (boiled)
1 full coffee-cup (1/2 pint) of ground coffee
1 quart of boiling water
White of an egg, and crushed shell of same
1/2 cup of cold water to settle it
Stir up the eggshell and the white (beaten) with the coffee and a very little cold water, and mix gradually with the boiling water in the coffee-boiler. Stir from the sides and top as it boils up. Boil pretty fast twelve minutes; pour in the cold water and take from the fire, setting gently upon the hearth to settle. In five minutes, pour it off carefully into your silver, china, or Britannia coffee-pot, which should be previously well scalded.
Send to table hot.
When I first read this, I thought the eggshell and egg white were odd additions to coffee. But then I started noticing that all my older cookbooks called for them when making boiled coffee. A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband: With Bettina's Best Recipes, published around 1917, gives similar instructions except that it doesn't mention eggshells, just the whites. All three of my editions of the Metropolitan Cook Book, ca. 1925, ca. 1943, and 1957, mention either eggshells or egg whites, or both. The seventh edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1941) has "1 egg or 3 eggshells" in the ingredients list -- but then directs you to add both of them in making the coffee.
All of these books give directions for other ways to make coffee, too. Even in 1875, Mrs. Harland was able to comment that "There are so many patent coffee-pots for this purpose, and the directions sold with them are so minute, that I need give only a few general rules here." But when it comes to boiled coffee, the egg and/or eggshells always appear. I suspected that I knew why: the egg would congeal around the coffee grounds and settle with them to the bottom of the pot, keeping the drink itself from being muddy and full of grounds. Still, it wasn't until the twelfth edition of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (by now re-named The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 1979) that I found my guess confirmed: the recipe there for "Boiled Coffee", given as a kind of quaint survival from earlier times that people might want to try while camping, says that "Some outdoorsmen crack an egg and mix it, crumpled-up shell and all, into the coffee grounds before pouring on the water. It helps the grounds to settle."
So, there you have it. If your Mr. Coffee dies one morning before producing anything drinkable, don't despair! A saucepan, some coffee, cold water and an egg can save the day.
Assuming you're awake enough to cope with them.