I will freely confess to spending my early adult years as a coffee barbarian; I not only voluntarily drank instant coffee, I thought Sanka was pretty good. Eventually, I discovered the true elixir that brewed coffee can be from partaking of breakfast at diners. Once converted to the one true way, I inquired about how people made coffee before instant coffee, and Mr. Coffee, or even stove-top percolators.

Some of what I heard seemed so odd, that I've spent a couple of weeks researching it. There are quite a lot of different ways to make coffee that don't require investing hundreds of dollars in fancy equipment. I'm going to be posting about several of the more interesting, and easy-to-use methods for making good coffee. Needless to say, these all assume that you're starting out with quality coffee.

My grandmother, born in the late 1890s, made coffee in a steel coffee pot that was pretty much like the one in the picture above. Note: this was not a percolator; it's essentially a coffee-pot shaped container for boiling water to make coffee. She made a pot of coffee in the morning, by adding a cup of grounds (she used a hand-grinder to grind the beans, sometimes, and bought ground coffee as well) to water that was boiling. She brought it to a simmer again, then let it boil a few minutes before sliding it to the back of stove.

There's a method of boiling coffee that uses clean crushed egg shells to help "settle" the grounds; my grandmother didn't do that, but many of her generation did, and I've had "cowboy" coffee made over a campfire that way. Here's the basic method:

Ingredients

• 10 tablespoons medium-ground full-flavored coffee
• 10 cups cold water (use bottled or filtered water if your tap water is unpleasant)
• Clean eggshells, crushed

Procedure

1. Place 9 cups of the water in a non-reactive saucepan or enamel coffeepot.
2. Add the coffee and crushed egg shells.
3. Bring all the ingredients to a full boil; partially covering the pot will shorten the time until the mixture boils.
4. Simmer, tightly covered, 5 to 7 minutes.
5. Add the tenth cup of cold water—this helps the grounds settle.
6. Let the coffee sit, off the burner, for two or three minutes to let the grounds settle.
7. Strain the coffee through a wire sieve or coffee filter into a coffee pot, and serve.

There's a slightly different version of "boiled" or "cowboy" coffee that I associate with "church ladies." Mostly, this alternative is associated with Swedish or Norwegian Lutheran congregations, and it involves adding a raw egg to the coffee grounds.The preparation calls for mixing the coffee grounds and the raw egg in a bowl, adding a little hot water, then adding the whole with the clean crushed shells to boiling water. The measurements are the same, as is the basic procedure. The raw egg cooks and traps the grounds, and helps remove some of the natural acid in coffee.