A few words about coffee

I learned about coffee from my mother.  I had my first cup of coffee from my grandmother, who invariably used Instant Maxwell House before lunch and Sanka after lunch, with half milk and four sugars.  Completely suitable for a seven-year old. Her daughter, though, had a very different approach to coffee. She used a stove top percolator (switched to an electric percolator in the 1970s but never got used to it), filled the top part to about 3/4 full regardless of how much coffee she was making, turned the stove to high, and let ‘er rip. When it was done, the cup was hot, steamy, bitter, strong, and ready for drinking without any milk or sugar polluting the results. That’s how I learned to appreciate coffee – very hot, very strong, and black.

There was no art or craft to this style of coffee preparation. When my mother went grocery shopping, she’d buy two or three 1 lb cans (and in those days they really were one pound) of Maxwell House and the kitchen smelled of coffee, fresh or stale, all day. Of course this was before the coffee revolution.  Before Starbuck’s, Peet’s, shade-grown organic beans, French presses, Keurig cups, Nespresso machines, caffe Americano, and soy lattes with skinny whipped cream and a shot of vanilla.  Before Mr. Coffee even, if you can believe that. It was a different time then. It was not, however, before Dunkin’ Donuts who served hot black coffee that could have been made two minutes or two hours ago in heavy white ceramic mugs.

I first encountered premium coffee as a college student in Harvard Square at the Coffee Connection. Like a  few other arty places in Harvard Square they served espressos and lattes, but they also roasted their own coffee beans, which came in several varieties, brewed coffee in some magical process that escaped me and charged double what the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street charged.  It made me feel so sophisticated to drink their coffee, though.  Coffee Connection was the Boston equivalent of Starbuck’s (Seattle) and Peet’s (Berkeley) in the 1970s and if you had any pretensions to being hip, you had to be a devotee of Coffee Connection. You had to buy beans from them and you had to brew your coffee in a French press you bought from them. Anything else marked you as hopelessly bourgeois.

And this was just the starting point. By the ’90s, coffee was becoming a serious fetish. It wasn’t quite as universal as it is today, but some people went to extraordinary lengths to establish their coffee creds. I remember my very dear friend Gerry Hardy whose taste in music was every bit as omnivorous and all-consuming as mine but whose taste in coffee was exact and particular.  Red Barn Roasters in Southborough, MA, was the only source of coffee that met his specific roasting criteria (coffee in a restaurant or coffee shop was never as good as that which he made at home) and he had a precise method of brewing that I could never follow.

Having just returned from Europe, I’ve been thinking about coffee and particularly about how national coffee is.  Ask any American about coffee and while some might snicker about some of Starbucks’ more inventive concoctions, there’s a pretty common understanding of what coffee is.  And while some might add milk and/or sugar, and some might prefer a strong or mild brew, we all basically understand the essence of coffee.

Except that what Americans think of as coffee is completely unavailable in France or Italy or Turkey (probably more places, but I’ve visited those three countries – I can’t speak to Spain or Greece for example). Order café in France or caffe in Italy and you get espresso. Some restaurants or bars or cafes that cater to tourists in France may be able to produce a filtered coffee (American style) but in Italy or Turkey?  Forget it.  Furthermore, it is considered a culinary faux pas to order cappuccinos or lattes at any time after mid-morning in Italy.  Those sweetened, milk based coffees are strictly breakfast beverages.

I remember a couple of years when my true love and I were having lunch at the canteen at the Paris Zoological Park in the Parc Vincennes. We had finished a much better lunch than one would normally expect from the lunchroom at a zoo and she wanted a coffee, but an American coffee.  Our server spoke very little English but someone at an adjacent table overheard us and told the waitress what we wanted. The waitress (not knowing that I spoke a little French) said to herself, “ah, un jus de chaussette” and then broke up laughing. “Jus de chaussette” translates as “sock juice” and refers to American coffee. I found out later it is a generalized slang expression based on the disdain that many French people have for American coffee. It comes from the WWI practice of French soldiers in the trenches of dipping a sock filled with coffee grounds in boiling water to produce something resembling coffee. The sock and coffee would be reused for weeks or months at a time (one hopes the water was changed occasionally). I don’t know if there is an equivalent Italian phrase.  If anyone knows of one, please let me know.

What I don’t get is how someone can spend an hour or two at a sidewalk cafe nursing an espresso.  There’s only about 2 oz of liquid there – how long can you make that last?  In America, you can sip on a  big mug of coffee for a while and if it is the kind of place that serves coffee in mugs and not paper cups, it’s not unrealistic to get a refill. Maybe that’s why so many people in France and Italy smoke – it’s because they don’t have enough coffee to sustain serious hanging out.  In Turkey, they address that problem by drinking tea in sidewalk cafes.  Coffee is strictly an after dinner affair.

The U.K. is harder to figure out because (a) tea is as prevalent, if not more so, than coffee, and (b) whether American coffee or espresso is the standard depends a lot on the establishment. In a pub, for example, a coffee is likely to be an American coffee made with a French press but in a coffee shop, it will invariably be an espresso.  The exception would be Starbucks, which are as ubiquitous in the U.K. as they are in the U.S.  At Starbucks, you have unlimited options for hot beverage consumptions which explains why there is always a line at Starbucks. In restaurants, what you get when you order coffee is entirely up to the preference of the chef. In Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, three other countries I’ve visited, coffee means American coffee unless you are at a French or Italian restaurant or cafe. Maybe coffee standards have something to do with the distance from the Mediterranean, with the U.K. being the outlier it usually is.

When I travel, I get used to sipping the dark bitter brew of espresso and always toy with the idea of getting an espresso machine for home. Once home, however, wrapping my hands around a hot mug of coffee and slurping some down (it is physically impossible to slurp espresso) seems so natural. Maybe it’s just a way of acknowledging that I’m home.