Count Rumford was born in Woburn, Mass., in 1753. He was apprenticed to a storekeeper in Salem in 1766. He became an object of distrust among the friends of the cause of American freedom: and, on the evacuation of Boston by the Royal troops in 1776, he was selected by Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire to carry dispatches to England. He left England in 1802, and resided in France from 1804 until his death in 1814. In 1772, he had married, or rather, as he put it, he was married by, a wealthy widow, the daughter of a highly respectable minister and one of the first settlers at Rumford, now called Concord, New Hampshire. It was from this town that he took his title of Rumford when he was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1791. His first wife having died, he married in Paris, the wealthy widow of the celebrated chemist, Lavoisier; and with her he lived an extremely uncomfortable life until they agreed to separate.
In his essay on coffee and coffee making, Count Rumford gives us a good pen picture of the preparation of the beverage in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He says:
Coffee is first roasted in an iron pan, or in a hollow cylinder, made of sheet iron, over a brisk fire; and when, from the colour of the grain, and the peculiar fragrance which it acquires in this process, it is judged to be sufficiently roasted, it is taken from the fire, and suffered to cool. When cold it is pounded in a mortar; or ground in a hand-mill to a coarse powder, and preserved for use.
Formerly, the ground Coffee being put into a coffee-pot, with a sufficient quantity of water, the coffee-pot was put over the fire, and after the water had been made to boil a certain time, the coffee-pot was removed from the fire, and the grounds having had time to settle, or having been fined down with isinglass, the clear liquor was poured off, and immediately served up in cups.
Count Rumford thought it a mistake to agitate the coffee powder in the brewing process, and in this he agreed with De Belloy. His improvement on the latter's pot is described in chapter XXXIV. He was a coffee connoisseur; and as such was one of the first to advocate the use of cream as well as sugar for making an ideal cup of the beverage. He refers, though not by name, to De Belloy's percolation method and says, "Its usefulness is now universally acknowledged."
A Few Definitions
Just here, in order to assure a better understanding of the subject, it may be well to clear up sundry misconceptions regarding the words percolation, filtration, decoction, infusion, etc., by the simple expedient of definition.
A decoction is a liquid produced by boiling a substance until its soluble properties are extracted. Thus the coffee drink was first a decoction; and a decoction is what one gets today when coffee is boiled in the good old-fashioned way—as "mother used to make it."
Infusion is the process of steeping—extraction without boiling. It is extraction accomplished at any temperature below boiling, and is a general classification of procedure capable of sub-division. As generally and correctly applied, it is the operation wherein hot water is merely poured upon ground coffee loose in a pot, or in a container resting on the bottom of the pot. In the strictest sense of the term, an infusion is also produced by percolation and filtration, when the water is not boiled in contact with the coffee.
Percolation means dripping through fine apertures in china or metal as in De Belloy's French drip pot.