All About Coffee by William H. Ukers (best new books to read .TXT) đź“•
CHAPTER II
HISTORY OF COFFEE PROPAGATION
A brief account of the cultivation of the coffee plant in the Old World, and of its introduction into the New--A romantic coffee adventure Page 5
CHAPTER III
EARLY HISTORY OF COFFEE DRINKING
Coffee in the Near East in the early centuries--Stories of its origin--Discovery by physicians and adoption by the Church--Its spread through Arabia, Persia, and Turkey--Persecutions and Intolerances--Early coffee manners and customs Page 11
CHAPTER IV
INTRODUCTION OF COFFEE INTO WESTERN EUROPE
When the three great temperance beverages, cocoa, tea, and coffee, came to Europe--Coffee first mentioned by Rauwolf in 1582--Early days of coffee in Italy--How Pope Clement VIII baptized it and made it a truly Christian beverage--The first Europe
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Supplementing the above, Charles Cooper, some time editor of the Epicure and The Table, has prepared for this work some notes on the evolution of the old-time London coffee houses into the present-day tea rooms, tea lounges, cafés, and restaurants for all comers. Mr. Cooper says of the transformation:
The old-fashioned London coffee-house that flourished forty to fifty years ago has within the past thirty years been completely extinguished by the modern tea rooms. These old-fashioned establishments were mainly situated in and about the Strand and Fleet Street, the neighborhood of the Inns of Court, etc. They did not sacrifice much to outside show and decoration. They were divided into boxes or pews, and were generally speaking clean and well ordered; the prices were moderate, and the fare simple but superlatively good. There is nothing to equal it now. Chops were cooked in the grill. The tea and coffee were of the best; the hams were York hams and the bacon the best Wiltshire; they were the last places where real buttered toast was made. The art is now lost. They catered exclusively to men; and their clientèle consisted of journalists, artists, actors, men from the Inns of Court, students, et al. A man living in chambers could breakfast comfortably at one of these places, and read all the morning papers at his ease. The most westerly perhaps of the old houses was Stone's in Panton Street, Haymarket, which has recently been sold. Groom's in Fleet Street, where a good cup of coffee may still be had, is principally frequented by barristers about the luncheon hour. They are usually men who lunch lightly.
The tea rooms, as I have said, have killed the coffee houses. At the time the latter flourished, there were no facilities in London for a woman, unattended by a man, to obtain refreshment beyond a weak cup of tea at a few confectioners'. It mattered the less in the days when the girl clerk had not come into being. When the field of women's employment widened, fresh requirements were created which the coffee shops did not meet.
Lyons' "Popular Café," Piccadilly—One of Many Operated Under That Name
Palm Court in the Waldorf Hotel—A Popular Resort for American Travelers
Palm Court in the Waldorf Hotel—A Popular Resort for American Travelers
TWO POPULAR PLACES FOR COFFEE IN LONDON
The tea room pioneers in London were the Aërated Bread Company, familiarly known as the A.B.C. I think that coffee palaces in provincial industrial centers had been started; but as part of a temperance propaganda, to counteract the attractions of the public house. The Aërated Bread Company was founded about the middle of the past century for the manufacture and sale of bread made under the patent aërated process of Dr. Daugleish. The shops were opened for the sale of bread to the public for home consumption; but to give people an opportunity of testing it, facilities were provided for obtaining a cup of tea, and bread and butter, on the premises. This subsidiary object became in a short time the most important part of the company's business. It multiplied its shops, enlarged its bill of fare to include cooked foods; and while, nowadays, the A.B.C. and its rivals cater to many thousands daily, I doubt if anybody ever buys a loaf to take home.
The A.B.C. has many competitors, similar shops having been started by Lyons, Lipton, Slaters. Express Dairy Company, Cabin, Pioneer Cafés, and others. Ex uno disce omnes.
The fare in all these places is much alike, as are the general equipment, prices, and class of customers. They cater for a cheap class of business. In the busy centers they are frequented mostly by young men and girl clerks and shop assistants, by women in town, shopping, and such-like custom. Young employees can get a modest mid-day meal at a price to suit a shallow pocket. Before the war, the ruling price for a cup of tea, and a roll and butter, was fourpence, and the general tariff in proportion. Nowadays, the war has run up prices at least fifty percent. During the worst times of food control the fare was very scanty and very unappetizing. As a rule, it is plain and wholesome, with no pretense of being recherché. Tea is almost always very good; coffee not on the same level. Their tea rooms are all places designed for small, quick meals; and are in no sense lounges.
Lyons have refreshment-houses of different grades. The Popular Café is a cut above the tea rooms, and so are the Corner Houses. Two years ago, the A.B.C. amalgamated with Buzard's, an old established confectioner's in Oxford Street—a famous cake-house.
The Monico and Gatti's appeal to a quite different class from that catered to by the tea shops, although perhaps not to what Mrs. Boffin would call "the highfliers of fashion" who frequent the lounges of the fashionable hotels. Gatti's original café was under the arches of Charing Cross station.
I may add about the Savoy that it was an outcome of the successful Gilbert and Sullivan operas of the seventies, D'Oyly Carte having expended some of his profits on building the hotel on a piece of waste ground by the Savoy Theatre. He brought over M. Ritz from Monte Carlo to manage the hotel and restaurant, and Escoffier, the greatest chef of the day, to preside over the cuisine. They made the Savoy famous for its dinners, and it has always maintained a high reputation, although Escoffier, who has now retired, ruled later at the Carlton; and Ritz, at the hotel in Piccadilly which bears his name.
Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, Arabian-Turkish methods of making coffee prevail. The accompanying illustration shows a group in a caravan of the faithful on the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The venerable Moslem, who is ambitious of becoming a hadji, is attended by his guards, distinguished by their fantastic dress; their glittering golden-hafted hanjars, stuck in their shawl girdles; and their silver-mounted pistols; the grave turban replaced by a many-tasseled cap. Their accommodation is the stable of a khan, or serai, shared with their camel. Their refreshment is coffee, thick, black and bitter, served by the khanji in tiny egg-shaped cups.
In Denmark and Finland coffee is made and served after the French and German fashion.
France. Were it not for the almost inevitable high roast and frequently the disconcerting chicory addition, coffee in France might be an unalloyed delight—at least this is how it appears to American eyes. One seldom, if ever, finds coffee improperly brewed in France—it is never boiled.
Second only to the United States, France consumes about two million bags of coffee annually. The varieties include coffee from the East Indies; Mocha; Haitian (a great favorite); Central American; Colombian; and Brazils.
Although there are many wholesale and retail coffee roasters in France, home roasting persists, particularly in the country districts. The little sheet-iron cylinder roasters, that are hand-turned over an iron box holding the charcoal fire, find a ready sale even in the modern department stores of the big cities. In any village or city in France it is a common sight on a pleasant day to find the householder turning his roaster on the curb in front of his home. Emmet G. Beeson, in The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal gives us this vignette of rural coffee roasting in the south of France:
In a certain town in the south of France I saw an old man with an outfit a little larger than the home variety, a machine with a capacity of about ten pounds. Instead of a cylinder in which to roast his coffee, he had perched on a sheet-iron frame a hollow round ball made of sheet iron. In the top of this ball there was a little slide which was opened by the means of a metal tool. In the sheet-iron frame he had kindled his charcoal fire. Directly in front of his roaster was a home-made cooling pan, the sides of which were of wood, the bottom covered with a fine grade of wire screening.
On this particular afternoon, the old man had taken up his place on the curb; and a big black cat had taken advantage of the warmth offered by the charcoal fire and was curled up, sleeping peacefully in the pan nearest the fire. The old man paid no attention to the cat, but went on rotating his ball of coffee and puffing away pensively on his cigarette. When his coffee had become blackened and burned, and blackened and burned it was, he stopped rotating the ball, opened the slide in the top, turned it over, and the hot, burned coffee rolled out, and much to his delight, on the sleeping cat, which leaped out of the pan and scampered up the street and into a hole under an old building.
I afterward learned that this old fellow made a business of going about the town gathering up coffee from the houses along the way and roasting it at a few sous per kilo, much the same fashion as a scissors grinder plies his trade in an American town.
Quite a few grocers roast their own coffee in crude devices much like those described above; but the large coffee roasters are gradually eliminating this sort of procedure. There are at Havre several roasters, but only two of importance; one does a business of about two hundred and fifty bags a day, and the next largest has a capacity of about one hundred and sixty bags a day. In Paris, there are many coffee roasters, some quite large, comparatively speaking, one having a capacity of about seven hundred and fifty bags a day. Shop-keepers in Paris and other large cities roast their coffee fresh daily. The machines used are of the ball or cylinder type, employing gas fuel and turned by electric power. Invariably they stand where they may be seen from the street.
Sample-roasters, or testing tables, in France are conspicuous by their absence.
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