bogus address wrote:

How did the coffee houses of 16th and 17th century England make their
coffee? Was what Daniel Defoe and Dr Johnson drank more like Turkish
or Starbuck's?

In a jug:
Take a one pint jug and a kettle of boiling water:

Put a couple of tablespoonfuls of freshly ground coffee into the warmed
jug, and pour in the water. Leave to infuse for 5 minutes, give it a
stir, and strain into a warmed serving pot.


How do you know?

I can't site specific books or diaries, but I *do* remember talking over
the coffee making after the family got a percolator and he stopped
making it the old way, which I prefer. As such conversations with him
did, this meandered down the by-ways of history. He read social history
at Edinburgh in the early 50's, and read lots of diaries of 18th C
politicians and the like at one point. He had a mind like a tape
recorder, and would have made a very good teacher. Reading diaries and
letters about the coffee shop politics and the start of things like
Lloyds of London was par for the course, and diarists and letter writers
twittered on about the quality of the coffee, which houses made the
best, and the best ways of doing it, along with how many mistresses they
indulged in and the price of socks and cabbages, all mixed in with the
politics.

That's how my parents made coffee in the 1950s, but is there a source
describing the same process from 250 years before?

Try some old diaries and letters. Household accounts are a good source
for domestic stuff like this. Cooks and housekeepers often saved the
tea leaves and coffee grounds for use below stairs after the Upstairs
folk had used them, or old them on to others...

(My parents then went to use a coffee percolator, a technology so crap
you don't even see them in car boot sales any more).

My mum still has hers, and it still works perfectly. I still prefer
Dad's old way, or the filter machine.

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