Coffee the way a seventeenth-century English household and coffeehouse made it: ground coffee boiled in water for a quarter of an hour and drunk as hot as you can stand, from a recipe book of 1659–72.
Untested: not yet made in this kitchen. It is here for the Coffeehouses in History page.
Ingredients
- 1 pint (about 570 ml, an imperial pint) water, ideally boiled and cooled first (see notes)
- 1 heaped tablespoon to 3 tablespoons (8 to 25 g) dark-roasted coffee, ground very fine (see notes)
Directions
- Bring the pint of water to the boil in a small saucepan or coffee pot.
- Stir in the ground coffee and keep it boiling gently for 15 minutes, stirring two or three times so it does not boil over.
- Take it off the heat and let it stand for a minute or two so the grounds settle.
- Pour off the coffee carefully, leaving the grounds behind, into small cups or bowls, and drink it as hot as you can.
Notes
Where this comes from After the coffee recipe in The Recipe Book 1659–72 of Archdale Palmer, Gent., of Wanlip, Leicestershire: “Take a gallon of faire water & boyle it until halfe be wasted, & then take of that water one pinte, and make it boile, [then] put in one spoonefull of the Powder of Coffee & let it boyle one quarter of an houre, stirring of it two or three times, for feare of running over, & drink it as hot as you can.” The gallon boiled down by half was probably to make the water safe; a modern kitchen can skip it. How much coffee Palmer’s “one spoonefull” is not a fixed measure, and a level spoon in a pint makes a very weak drink by modern taste. A seventeenth-century recipe attributed to the Somerset Archives uses 1½ oz of coffee to a quart of water (about 21 g a pint) and boils it for three quarters of an hour; start somewhere between the two. How it was served London coffeehouses boiled coffee in large pots over the fire and served it in small handleless dishes, and Pasqua Rosée’s handbill says it should be “taken as hot as possibly can be endured”. The photo A French faience coffee pot of 1670–1695 in the Cooper Hewitt museum, from the same decades; it is not this recipe’s coffee.