Fannie Farmer’s Filtered Coffee with Cut Sugar and Cream

The cleaner, costlier cup

Farmer admits it was not the usual way. “Commonly speaking, boiled coffee is preferred, and is more economical for the consumer,” she writes, and her boiled coffee, printed just below, needs an egg, shell and all, stirred into the grounds to settle them. Filtered coffee needed no egg, only a pot with “a strainer to hold coffee without allowing grounds to mix with infusion,” and she notes that “various kinds of coffee-pots are on the market” for it. Grinding followed the method: fine for filtered, coarse or medium for boiled.

Her pages on buying coffee are a warning to shoppers. Coffee was “often adulterated with chiccory, beans, peas, and various cereals,” and she gives a cold-water test much like the one the Victorians used against chicory in the coffee: add cold water to the suspect coffee, and “chiccory will sink; pure coffee will float.” Labels misled too. “Strange as it may seem to the consumer,” she writes, “all coffee sold as Java does not come from the island of Java.” For “average taste” she recommends two parts Java to one of Mocha.