Dredge Boat Coffee -- recipe

Thought it might be fun to use one of my own, today.

It's almost Oyster season, and though dredge boats are now for tourists only, their world lives on in fiction.

Stories of the culture of the working oystermen abound, including the daily miracles performed in cramped after-cabins by their legendary cooks.

Barfer Robinson’s Dredge Boat Coffee

In a percolator pot, fill basket with about as much ground coffee as it will hold – add a dash of salt and throw an empty egg shell in the bottom of the pot. Fill the coffee pot up with water, level with the basket.

Percolate on high heat until liquid in the bubble top is good and dark. Remove from fire and when it has stopped perking, remove the percolator basket. Fill up the rest of the pot with white lightning, if there’s no white lighting, bourbon or dark rum will do.

Serve black to six hungry crewmen along with heaps of bacon, fried eggs, and pancakes smothered in butter and molasses and it will help keep them warm, even when they're sailing against the wind, on a frosty morning.

Arline Chase's character, Barfer Robinson, is ship’s cook aboard the bugeye Hope V. Rogers. “Barfer”, so called by his shipmates because he is often seasick, made his first appearance in The Drowned Land... That novella won The Governor's Award in Maryland, in 1984, and the short story collection was an Eppie Finalist in 1999. He, along with his shipmates and many of the other characters appear in the later novel Killraven.