Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, April 19, 2000

Old-fashioned coffee and recipes from the 1880s

I have a fairly crisp mental picture of the white enamel coffeepot I need. It's the kind my grandmother kept on her stove - always hot, always on the back burner - when I was shorter than I am now. I want to see if I can make coffee the way she used to make it.
   This all started when I found a recipe for fixing coffee that seems to be the way my grandmother made it. It calls for mashing up an egg, shell and all, in the grounds. I have resolved to try this when I find the proper enamel pot, that is if it's still being made today.
   The recipe comes from "How the Cimarron River Got Its Name" by Ernestine Sewell Linck, published by the Republic of Texas Press. There's more about the history of coffee in this book than I want to know, but it does have that recipe for brewing coffee the old-fashioned way:
   "Heat a pot with two quarts of cold water to boiling. (Allow to boil only two to three minutes.) Place a cup of ground coffee and an egg in the middle of a piece of cheesecloth and tie the cheesecloth into a sack. Then break the egg in the sack and mix with coffee by massaging the bag. Drop the sack into the boiling water and cook for four minutes. Add one-half cup cold water to settle any grounds. The coffee is absolutely superb.''
   The idea that food activates the memory always reminds me of the passage in Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past.'' The author eats a cookie the way his aunt liked it "and immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater.''
   In that same way, the smell of brewing coffee can remind me of who I am and where I came from. I can close my eyes and see my grandmother's clapboard house, by a dirt road, with cotton fields stretching to the lonely horizon.
   I guess, to be authentic, this coffee should be served with evaporated milk from the can. There's an old rhyme for Carnation milk in this book:
  
   "Carnation milk, best in the lan'
   Comes to the table in a little red can.
   No teats to pull, no hay to pitch.
   Jes' punch a hole in the sonofabitch.''
  
   On the subject of food, an old ledger of the R.G. Blossman & Co., Corpus Christi grocers, shows the prices of things in 1881. The cheapest brand of coffee sold for 18 cents a pound, or 20 cents a pound for the most expensive. White sugar sold for a penny a pound. Refined sugar had replaced the hard brown sugar cones, peloncillo, that once came up from Mexico on ox carts. Butter was shipped in 50-pound tubs from New York. Lake ice came by schooner from Maine and was stored, cocooned in sawdust, in a dugout under the bluff.
   Corpus Christi was known for its seafood back then. Royal Givens was the seafood merchant of the town. He shipped fish and oysters on ice all over the country. He canned turtle soup, clams and oysters. His oyster beds were located on the reef between Nueces and Corpus Christi Bays. His plant was destroyed in the 1919 storm.
   In the 1880s, it was a real chore to cook biscuits, or anything else, on Mustang Island because there was no firewood. Capt. John Mercer in his log books often referred to taking beachcombing trips to look for driftwood for the fire. There's a recipe for ham casserole (he called it pie) in the Mercer logs: "Pick the ham into fine small pieces. Boil a cup of rice. Beat up two eggs and stir in with the ham and rice. Season with salt and pepper and onions. Put in a deep pan and bake.''
   There was a recipe in the Caller in 1881 for fried beefsteak: "Take a nice, tender steak, about an inch thick, lay it evenly in a frying pan over a quick fire. Add salt and a little boiling water, cover it close and boil 20 minutes. Then add a large piece of butter and fry both sides until done. Take on to a hot platter and sift pepper over, pour on the gravy, and serve. This is superior to boiled steak, as it retains its flavor more perfectly, and is much tenderer.''
   I also found a recipe for beef jerky, a South Texas specialty that dates back to the Comanches and early Spanish settlers. The word jerky, I'm told, comes from the Spanish "charqui.'' It was made this way: Thin strips of lean beef were rubbed with salt and black pepper and hung on a fence to dry in the hottest sun. Each day, the strips were turned until they dried crisp, lost their redness and became brown as chewing tobacco.
   It was often kept in a cloth sack on the back porch where kids could grab a strip for a snack between meals. Once cured, jerky was the fast food of its day and, in the years when South Texas had more longhorns than people, almost free.
   (Sources: Caller-Times archives; excerpts from the Mercer Logs; "How the Cimarron River Got Its Name" by Ernestine Sewell Linck.)
  

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