Old-Time Coffee and Old-Time Cookbooks
What to do when you wake up in the morning to below freezing temperatures and the power out? For me, first thing I want is a cup of hot coffee to jump-start my brain. But with the power out, my brain was tasked with first remembering how to make old-time coffee.
Normally I make coffee in an electric percolator. But that’s out without power.
Hmm. But we have a propane stove.
With no electricity, we have no running water from the well. But we do have emergency water stored in jugs.
So all I had to do was remember how to make coffee on the stove. Having not done it in decades, I forgot the finer details, and my go-to looking-up place (internet) was down.
Hmm. But I do have a collection of old-time cookbooks.
Old-Time Cookbooks
I’m not a fan of modern cookbooks with recipes that start with a box of this or a can of that. I also don’t like recipes with ingredients I never heard of and wouldn’t know where to get. I like recipes that focus on things I grow in my garden, coop, or barn. So I hang onto my old cookbooks.
My oldest cookbook is the awesome 2-volume Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking. I figured it might have instructions for making stove-top or campfire coffee. I wasn’t wrong. But the only such recipe was for “Old-Fashioned ‘Boiled’ Egg Coffee.” That was a little more complicated than I was up for at the moment.
My favorite cookbook is a well-worn 12-volume Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery from 1965. It has a recipe for “Campfire Coffee,” that calls for putting grounds in a thin cloth bag. That makes sense, but I wasn’t ready to rummage around with a flashlight looking for a piece of cloth to make a bag. I probably could have adapted that and other campfire instructions, but instead I consulted my next favorite cookbook.
It’s the 1971 edition of Joy of Cooking (not the more recent version!) by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker. Bingo! The instructions for “Steeped Coffee” call for bringing the water to a boil, stirring in the coffee grounds, then let it stand for 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the desired strength.
The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of grounds per ¾ to 1 cup water. Instead I used the coffee measure and amount of water we otherwise would have put into the percolator. That old-time coffee came out just as good as perked coffee.
An interesting note in Joy was that you can either strain out the grounds, or settle them to the bottom of the pot using a beaten egg. “The egg serves to clarify the coffee. If anything, it detracts from rather than adds to its flavor.” So it was a wise choice to pass up the Meta Given’s “Egg Coffee.”
Propane Stove
A movement is afoot to convince home owners to get rid of gas stoves as a means of going green. In our rural home, if we didn’t have a propane cooktop, during the February 2021 Polar Vortex power outage we would have gone 4½ days without being able to so much as fry an egg.
But that’s not the only reason we have gas. We do a lot of canning. Our All American pressure canner holds a double layer of jars. At the time we bought our cooktop, none of the manufacturers of electric cooktops would guarantee they could support that kind of weight. Our KitchenAid gas range has a heavy-duty cast-iron grill that’s plenty strong enough to support whatever we put on it. So I’m not about to give it up.
Some of our neighbors still cook on wood stoves, like my grandmother did. That would be an alternative to the gas cooktop, both during power outages and for canning. Whether wood is greener than gas, or propane is greener than natural gas, depends on who’s talking.
Matches to the Rescue
Our propane cooktop has a built-in electronic igniter. Without electricity, the burner won’t automatically ignite when it’s turned on. You can ignite it with a lighter, which we don’t have because they don’t last. Or with matches.
Matches have been on my shopping list for several months. During the pandemic we shop mostly by mail, and matches don’t ship. The few times I’d been to a brick-and-mortar store I couldn’t find any matches.
As luck would have it, the last time I was inside a store, a few weeks before the power outage, I found matches. I wanted just one box, but they were bundled in groups of three. I picked up a bundle, then — being overly frugal — I put it back. Then I picked it up, then put it back. Finally I decided I’d had so much trouble finding matches that I might as well take the three boxes.
So there you have it. In about the same amount of time it took you to read this page, and with the help of an old-time cookbook, my husband and I had piping hot old-time coffee to help us cope with whatever else that February storm would throw at us.
