[Post bearing heavily reworked rephrasing and summarization from the original article, wonderfully written by Jerard Fagerberg @ Thetakeout.com, please read it in full, it is truly great!!! Picture @ Pixabay]
Richard Tellström, a professor of food history at Stockholm University [explains] that fish skin (often from lutfisk) was used in the 1700s to clear coffee, helping separate the rough grounds, producing a similarly bright, translucent brew. However, when drip coffee makers became household items in the 1970s, and fine grounds became readily available, people stopped using proteins to clear coffee. “The custom is today forgotten in Sweden,” Tellström says. Egg coffee is a custom largely tied to Swedish immigrants and it fits in well with the fika tradition of afternoon coffee and pastries, but Swedes would not recognize the drink today.
Second- and third-generation Swedes are preserving the tradition of Swedish egg coffee in Minnesota, where the method of clearing coffee with an egg is most commonly associated with church basements, where congregants would gather after service, volunteers making large batches of low-quality coffee with very simple equipment. For this reason, the drink is sometimes known as “Lutheran egg coffee” or “church basement coffee”. Jim Zieba, a volunteer for the Salem Lutheran Church at the Minnesota State Fair since the 1970s, explains: “The egg is mashed into the grounds, and the grounds are boiled in, kind of like campfire coffee.” “The coffee being slightly acid and [the] egg being alkaline, they cancel each other out, and you get a very mild clear cup of coffee.”
The drink is indeed a sensation […] The egg-filtered brew is clear like a globe of fossilized amber: […] the taste is mild, betraying the enhanced caffeine load. There is absolutely no egg characteristic, other than the initial stink of cooking yolk that dissipates after the coffee is extracted. A cup goes down smooth, like a long-steeped English breakfast tea.
This was the method described in the Boy Scout manual for campfire coffee: […] “you’re clarifying the water, you’re clarifying the coffee, and you get a mellower, more pure flavor out of super low-quality coffee”. This was before the advent of the percolator [when] the coffee was boiled directly in the pot. Eggs were cheap, and albumen is a potent clarifying agent, so naturally the two came together. [But today] the State Fair is one of the last places [where] Swedish egg coffee is commercially available. […] “It didn’t happen because the coffee is too good, you can’t do it without lower quality coffee,” Eater Twin Cities editor Joy Summers says, noting that high-quality grounds are actually diminished by the egg’s mellowing effect. […] Beyond that, egg coffee […] needs to be tended, with constant agitation. It works for a large batch, but for a single cup it’s only worth it if it stokes memories of your past — egg coffee remains a treasured custom among the few who grew up on it.
[Post bearing heavily reworked rephrasing and summarization from the original article, wonderfully written by Jerard Fagerberg @ Thetakeout.com, please read it in full, it is truly great!!! Picture @ Pixabay]
