Coffee

I gave a brief mention to coffee in yesterday's meandering post and, since then, my mind has meandered far and wide on just this one subject.  So much so that I think I had better get some of those thoughts off my chest (if you'll forgive the biological mix-up - or even if you won't).

My mind started by wandering back into the past and those far off days when I was a young buck about town.  Hah!  I was never that, I was more an innocent at sea.  But either way, there were no things as coffee shops back then a few years either side of 1960; they were coffee bars.  I suppose there were illicit deals done in at least some of them, but coffee bars were, on the whole, fairly innocuous places.  There were two in Brighton that I favoured.  The Continental was in Castle Square.  This was an ordinary shop-type construction with a large, plate glass window.  The coffee was, I remember, served in glass cups, fairly wide, shallow ones.

The other favourite was the Penny Farthing.  This was an old, narrow building in East Street,  spread over several floors with small tables squeezed into some difficult places for the waitresses, one of whom was to become the Old Bat.  She moonlighted there for a while to supplement the fairly low salary she earned at the day job.

There were others, but those two are the ones that stick in my mind (partly because of the company I had in each).

Coffee shops have, of course, been around for two or three hundred years or more.  That bastion of the insurance world - Lloyds of London - started out as a coffee shop and it was customary for many deals to be conducted in similar premises.  We never seem to hear of such places in Victorian times but back in 1861 one Abraham Packham, then aged 21 - a 1st cousin three times removed to the Old Bat - was a waiter at the Jamaica Coffee House in St Michael's Alley in the City of London.  It is now the Jamaica Wine House, a Shepherd Neame pub, which links it to me as Deborah Shepherd - my 6x great grandmother - lent her nephew John Shepherd the £3000 to start a brewing business - now Shepherd Neame.  According to its web site, the Jamaica Wine House was originally London's first coffee shop, which opened in 1652 and counted Samuel Pepys among its early customers.

Something I haven't noticed for quite a few years is the smell of roasting coffee wafting out of a shop door.  There used to be one such shop in George Street but it's probably a charity shop now; most of the George Street shops seem to be.  I always used to enjoy that smell.  But it's funny, coffee always smells better than it tastes.  I wonder why?

Talking of taste, I said (or implied) yesterday that I actively dislike the coffee sold by those new chains such as Starbucks, Costa and Cafe Nero.  And for goodness sake, what is it with all these new-fangled drinks like skinny latte or americano?  Coffee used to be either black or white, with or without sugar.  I can just about cope with cappuccino but I don't even begin to know what all the rest are.  At least if I order a coffee in France I know what I will get: a small black espresso which both smells and tastes good.  It's much the same in Italy, although there the quantity of coffee served as an espresso is so minute that I have in the past resorted to ordering a cappuccino.

I will drink my coffee white if I have to and, indeed, very occasionally choose to do so but for preference my coffee should be, as Talleyrand said, black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love.

But how did we come to start drinking coffee?  I quote from the Weekly Wire web site.

Although coffee seems to have evolved in Ethiopia, no witnesses recorded who discovered its virtues or first cultivated it. We have only myths. For example, there is the story of Sheikh Hadji Omar, an exiled dervish who would have died in the desert if a ghost had not led him to discover the coffee plant.

Another popular legend, frequently displayed in coffee shops, attributes the discovery of coffee to an observant Arabian goatherd named Kaldi. Usually his goats were lazy and compliant. Then one day he noticed that they perked up considerably after eating the berries of a particular plant. In fact, they danced about on their hind legs in a drug-induced frenzy. Understandably, Kaldi felt he could use a little excitement in his own life, so he ate some of the berries. As a result, he didn't doze off once that afternoon. His mind seemed sharper; his heart raced; and for the first time goatherding seemed like a promising career choice.

Nearby was the monastery that would eventually grow up into the holy city of Mecca. After observing the buzzed Kaldi capering with his flock, one of the monks tried the miraculous discovery himself. Soon he was zapped. He took some berries back to the monastery, and the brothers discovered that now they could pray until dawn without nodding off. In time they shared this pious stimulant with others.

There are at least two grains of truth in this story. Coffee beans did indeed become standard equipment for all-night prayer sessions, and coffee was chewed long before it was drunk. Prior to being processed into a drink, raw coffee has a high protein content. Sir Richard Burton, the English explorer, reported that when he traveled in central Africa in the 19th century, the locals invariably presented visitors with a handful of wild coffee beans to chew. "According to the Arabs," he wrote, coffee "has...stimulating properties, affects the head, prevents somnolency, renders water sweet to the taste, and forms a pleasant refreshing beverage...."

Eventually addicts expanded the menu. First someone got the notion of crushing the berries and mixing them with that appetizing staple of early diets--fat. (The standard calculation was that a hunter or traveler required a daily ration of this concoction roughly the size of a tennis ball.) Next, a courageous gourmet fermented the pulp and drank the result. Later there was a drink incorporating both hull and fruit. Not until the 1200s or so did someone finally roast a coffee bean over a charcoal fire.
Soon the practice of drinking coffee spread across the land and began to flourish in cities such as Mecca. Coffee, which suited the Muslim religion's intellectual, anti-alcohol attitudes, has been called "the wine of Islam." With surprising speed, travelers carried the new beverage throughout the Muslim world. The first coffeehouses began to appear, complete with a number of activities proscribed by strict Muslims, including gaming, music, singing--and even, Allah forbid, dancing.

Worst of all, while gathered together over their stimulating coffee, troublemakers began to discuss the world around them and to question the wisdom and motives of their rulers. Naturally, this made the rulers uneasy. In the mid-17th century, one Ottoman official declared coffee drinking not only illegal but punishable by severe penalties. First offenders received a beating. Second offenders could look forward to being drowned.

So now you know.  Or maybe not.

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Given the snow, it is hardly surprising that our local golf courses have been closed.  This was the view of the Roman Camp from the south-west on Friday.  It is as well that there are gorse bushes on the camp.