To make a perfect cup of coffee three things are necessary:

1. Clean water, freshly boiled, in a clean teakettle. If the water is soft it must be taken at the first boil; if hard, boil ten minutes.

2. A good percolating pot, one that will hold the ground coffee above the water.

3. A good quality of coffee, carefully selected and cleaned, dry roasted and finely ground. Pulverized coffee is economical and good if the cook and housewife know how to use it, but unless percolated through a muslin bag or a hair percolator, the coffee is bitter and muddy.

The coffee pot must be washed and scalded every day, rinsed thoroughly and dried.

For breakfast coffee use scalded, not boiled milk. Do not use cream. I am speaking now from the standpoint of health. Hot coffee poured into cream makes a mixture that nine out of ten times produces "sour stomach" and flatulency.

Allow one tablespoonful of ground coffee to each half pint of boiling water. To begin; rinse the teakettle thoroughly, fill it with cold water, stand it over a quick fire and bring to boiling point. Scald the pot, let it stand a minute, empty out the water, put in the desired quantity of coffee and pour through slowly the given quantity of boiling water. If you are making coffee for one person, use a small pot, otherwise the grounds will be distributed in too thin a layer over the percolator. Do not allow the infusion to stand even five minutes after it is made; use at once, or it loses its flavor and becomes bitter. In percolated coffee one gets the aroma in the infusion; if coffee is boiled, the aroma is driven off and the decoction is usually bitter.

If you use an alcohol pot with a glass top, scald the under part of the pot, fill it with fresh boiling water and adjust the glass top, put in the given quantity of coffee, cover, light the lamp and allow the water to pass through the coffee for at least five minutes. Turn down the lamp to keep the coffee hot until served. The grounds are so far above the coffee that they need not be removed. If coffee is made in the kitchen, percolated in a bag or in a "second story" pot, it should be lifted from the pot as soon as percolated. A few drops coming from the stale grounds will spoil the flavor of the whole potful.

A funnel-shaped haircloth bag that can be purchased at any house-furnishing store, hung in a china pitcher or pot, makes a good percolator. Both pot and bag must be scalded before the ground coffee is put in.