The spirit of cookery

There are many excellent varieties of raw coffee in the market. By buying some raw coffee and roasting it yourself, you have the certainty of purity of the product ; its quality you must ascertain by taste. You can also buy the coffee roasted in the bean, and grind it yourself. Or you may buy it ground, in which case you have to take care to buy it from a merchant who will sell it unadulterated with chicory or any other strange vegetable matter. The roasting of coffee should be done either in a very thick iron saucepan, with constant stirring, if it have to be done over a strong fire, or in a revolving drum of sheet iron over little flames of gas, brushwood, or pine cones. The berries should be sufficiently roasted to be crisp, and break easily on pressure, yet they should not be over-roasted. In either case the aroma is missed which characterizes good coffee. You can make very good coffee by merely infusing with boiling water a certain quantity of ground coffee, and filter- COFFEE, TEA, YEEBA, AND CHOCOLATE 625 ing the infusion through a sieve, a cloth, or paper ; the latter medium gives the brightest product. But this process of merely infusing is very wasteful, even when the coffee is finely powdered. It is preferable to unite the process of boiling and infusing in the following manner : Place the amount of coffee which it is intended to use, less about one-tenth of its bulk, which is to be reserved, into the vessel in which you want to boil it, and pour over it the measured quantity of cold water ; now heat to ebullition and keep boiling for some minutes ; then take the vessel off the fire and add to the liquid the reserved tenth part of the coffee, and stir it well in, but without boiling the mixture again. Let stand a few minutes, and then pour the coffee on the filter, liquid first, grounds last. To keej) coffee hot, place the vessel containing it in a waterbath, but do not heat it directly on a hot-plate, or on the fire, as it thereby alters its taste somewhat, and assumes the quality of merely boiled coffee. Boiled coffee is rarely bright when merely decanted, but requires filtration to become so. In Europe tea is generally prepared by infusion of the leaves with boihng water, the vessel in which the infusion is made being warmed and rinsed previously with boiling water. The Japanese reduce their tea to a fine powder by pounding it ; they put a certain portion of this into a teacup, pour boiling water upon it, stir it up, and drink it as soon as it is cool enough. Dubuisson recommended to put cold water into a kettle with the tea, cover it close, set it on the fire, and make it all but boil ; when you see a sort of white scum on the surface take it from the fire; when the leaves sink it is ready. Or the night before you wish to have tea ready for drinking, pour on it as much cold water as you wish to make tea ; next morning pour oft’ the clear liquor, and when you wish to drink it make it warm. This last method is perhaps not to be advised for general use, as all that portion of theine, which is in coml)ination with tannin, and then very little soluble in cold water, and not even easily soluble in hot, will remain unextracted. But for producing tea with a minimum of astringency the process is useful.