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. Inquiry regarding this subject discloses that coffee is sold on description; and when the French trader is asked, "How do you know your delivery is up to description so far as cup quality is concerned?" he answers that this is arrived at from the general appearance and the smell of the coffee in the green. Perhaps one reason for the laxity in buying cup quality may be explained by the fact that coffee is roasted very high, in fact it is burned almost to a charred state; and unless the coffee is unusually bad in character, the burned taste eliminates any foreign flavor it may have.
The fact that coffee was, and still is, quite generally sold to the consumer green, accounts for Central American coffees taking first place. Style takes preference over everything else when it comes to selling to a Frenchman.
To the American coffee merchant it seems that the French are carrying their artistic tastes to an unreasonable extreme when they apply them to coffee; for coffee is grown to drink and not to look at.
Since the coming of the large coffee roaster, who delivers roasted coffee right down the line to the consumer, Santos has come in for its share of the business. The roasters are getting good results out of Santos blends, up to fifty percent and sixty percent with West Indian and Central American coffees. Rio is as much in disfavor in France as it is in the United States, perhaps more so.
In Brittany the demand is for peaberry coffee, no matter of what variety. This comes about from the fact that the people of this section of the country still do a great deal of their roasting at home, and have become accustomed to the use of peaberry coffee because they do not have the improved hand roasters, and still do a great deal of their roasting in pans in the ovens of their stoves. The peaberry coffee rolls about so nicely in the pan that they get a much more uniform roast.
Nearly all the coffee is ground at home, which is not a bad practise for the consumer; but perhaps works hardship on the dealer, who can mix some grade grinders into his blends without doing them any material harm. Where coffee mills are used in the stores, they are of the Strong-Arm family and of an ancient heritage. To get a growl out of the grocer in France, buy a kilo of coffee and ask him to grind it.
Package coffee and proprietary brands have not come into their own to the extent that they have in the United States, although there are at present two firms in Paris which have started in this business and are advertising extensively on billboards, in street cars, and in the subways. However, most coffee is still sold in bulk. The butter, egg, and cheese stores of France do a very large business in coffee. Prior to the war and high prices, there were some very large firms doing a premium business in coffee, tea, spices, etc. They still exist, and have a very fine trade; but since the high prices of coffees and premiums, the business has gone down very materially. They operate by the wagon-route and solicitor method, just as some of our American companies do. One very large firm in Paris has been in this business for more than thirty years, operating branches and wagons in every town, village, and hamlet in France.
The consumption of coffee is increasing very materially in France; some say, on account of the high price of wine, others hold that coffee is simply growing in favor with the people. Among the masses, French breakfast consists of a bowl or cup of café au lait, or half a cup or bowl of strong black coffee and chicory, and half a cup of hot milk, and a yard of bread. The workingman turns his bread on end and inserts it into his bowl of coffee, allowing it to soak up as much of the liquid as possible. Then he proceeds to suck this concoction into his system. His approval is demonstrated by the amount of noise he makes in the operation.
Among the better classes, the breakfast is the same, café au lait, with rolls and butter, and sometimes fruit. The brew is prepared by the drip, or true percolator, method or by filtration. Boiling milk is poured into the cup from a pot held in one hand together with the brewed coffee from a pot held in the other, providing a simultaneous mixture. The proportions vary from half-and-half to one part coffee and three parts milk. Sometimes, the service is by pouring into the cup a little coffee then the same quantity of milk and alternating in this way until the cup is filled.
Coffee is never drunk with any meal but breakfast, but is invariably served en demi-tasse after the noon and the evening meals. In the home, the usual thing after luncheon or dinner is to go into the salon and have your demi-tasse and liqueur and cigarettes before a cosy grate fire. A Frenchman's idea of after-dinner coffee is a brew that is unusually thick and black, and he invariably takes with it his liqueur, no matter if he has had a cocktail for an appetizer, a bottle of red wine with his meat course, and a bottle of white wine with the salad and dessert course. When the demi-tasse comes along, with it must be served his cordial in the shape of cognac, benedictine, or crème de menthe. He can not conceive of a man not taking a little alcohol with his after-dinner coffee, as an aid, he says, to digestion.
In Normandy, there prevails a custom in connection with coffee drinking that is unique. They produce in this province great quantities of what is known as cidre, made from a particular variety of apple grown there—in other words, just plain hard cider. However, they distil this hard cider, and from the distillation they get a drink called calvados.
The man from Normandy takes half a cup of coffee, and fills the cup with calvados, sweetened with sugar, and drinks it with seeming relish. Ice-cold coffee will almost sizzle when calvados is poured into it. It tastes like a corkscrew, and one drink has the same effect as a crack on the head with a hammer. From the toddling age up, the Norman takes his calvados and coffee.
In the south of France they make a concoction from the residue of grapes. They boil the residue down in water, and get a drink called marc; and it is used in much the same way as the Norman in the north uses calvados. Then there is also the very popular summertime drink known as mazagran, which in that region means seltzer water and cold coffee, or what Americans might call a coffee highball.
Making coffee in France has been, and always will be, by the drip and the filtration methods. The large hotels and cafés follow these methods almost entirely, and so does the housewife. When company comes, and something unusual in coffee is to be served, Mr. Beeson says he has known the cook to drip the coffee, using a spoonful of hot water at a time, pouring it over tightly packed, finely ground coffee, allowing the water to percolate through to extract every particle of oil. They use more ground coffee in bulk than they get liquid in the cup, and sometimes spend an hour producing four or five demi-tasses. It is needless to say that it is more like molasses than coffee when ready for drinking.
It is not unusual in some parts of France to save the coffee grounds for a second or even a third infusion, but this is not considered good practise.
Von Liebig's idea of correct coffee making has been adapted to French practise in some instances after this fashion: put used coffee grounds in the bottom chamber of a drip coffee pot. Put freshly ground coffee in the upper chamber. Pour on boiling water. The theory is that the old coffee furnishes body and strength, and the fresh coffee the aroma.
The cafés that line the boulevards of Paris and the larger cities of France all serve coffee, either plain or with milk, and almost always with liqueur. The coffee house in France may be said to be the wine house; or the wine house may be said to be the coffee house. They are inseparable. In the smallest or the largest of these establishments coffee can be had at any time of day or night. The proprietor of a very large café in Paris says his coffee sales during the day almost equal his wine sales.
The French, young or old, take a great deal of pleasure in sitting out on the sidewalk in front of a café, sipping coffee or liqueur. Here they love to idle away the time just watching the passing show.
In Paris, there are hundreds of these cafés lining the boulevards, where one may sit for hours before the small tables reading the newspapers, writing letters, or merely idling. In the morning, from eight to eleven, employees, men-about-town, tourists, and provincials throng the cafés for café au lait. The waiters are coldly polite. They bring the papers, and brush the table—twice for café créme (milk), and three times for café complet (with bread and butter).
In the afternoon, café means a small cup or glass of café noir, or café nature. It is double the usual amount of coffee dripped by percolator or filtration device, the process consuming eight to ten minutes. Some understand café noir to mean equal parts of coffee and brandy with sugar and vanilla to taste. When café noir is mixed with an equal quantity of cognac alone it becomes café gloria. Café mazagran is also much in demand in the summertime. The coffee base is made as for café noir, and it is served in a tall glass with water to dilute it to one's taste.
Few of the cafés that made Paris famous in the eighteenth century survive. Among those that are notable for their coffee service are the Café de la Paix; the Café de la Régence, founded in 1718; and the Café Prévost, noted also for chocolate after the theater.
Germany. Germany originated the afternoon coffee function known as the kaffee-klatsch. Even today, the German family's reunion takes place around the coffee table on Sunday afternoons. In summer, when weather permits, the family will take a walk into the suburbs, and stop at a garden where coffee is sold in pots. The proprietor furnishes the coffee, the cups, the spoons and, in normal times, the sugar, two pieces to each cup; and the patrons bring their own cake. They put one piece of sugar into each cup and take the other pieces home to the "canary bird," meaning the sugar bowl in the pantry.
Cheaper coffee is served in some gardens, which conspicuously display large signs at the entrance, saying: "Families may cook their own coffee in this place." In such a garden, the patron merely buys the hot water from the proprietor, furnishing the ground coffee and cake himself.
While waiting for the coffee to brew, he may listen to the band and watch the children play under the trees. French or Vienna drip pots are used for brewing.
Every city in Germany has its cafés, spacious places where patrons sit around small tables, drinking coffee, "with or without" turned or unturned, steaming or iced, sweetened or unsweetened, depending on the sugar supply; nibble, at the same time, a piece of cake or pastry, selected from a glass pyramid; talk, flirt, malign, yawn, read, and smoke. Cafés are, in fact, public reading rooms. Some places keep hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers and magazines on file for the use of patrons. If the customer buys only one cup of coffee, he may keep his seat for hours, and read one newspaper after another.
Three of the four corners of Berlin's most important street crossing are occupied by cafés. This is where Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse meet. On the southwest corner there is Kranzler's staid old café, a very respectable place, where the lower hall is even reserved for non-smokers. On the southeast corner is Café Bauer, known the world over. However, it has seen better days. It has been outdistanced by competitors. On the northeast corner is the Victoria, a new-style place, very bright, and less staid. There no room is reserved for non-smokers, for most of the ladies, if they do not themselves smoke, will light the cigars for their escorts.
Around the Potsdamer Platz there is a number of cafés. Josty's is perhaps the most frequented in Berlin. It is the best liked on account of the trees and terraces in front. Farther to the west, on Kuerfuerstendamm, there are dozens of large cafés.
Some of the cafés are meeting-places for certain professions and trades. The Admiral's café, in Friedrichstrasse, for instance, is the "artistes'" exchange. All the stage folk and stars of the tanbark meet there every day. Chorus girls, tumblers, ladies of the flying trapeze, contortionists, and bareback riders are to be found there, discussing their grievances, denouncing their managers, swapping their diamonds, and recounting former triumphs. Cinema-makers come also to pick out a cast for a new film play. There one can pick out a full cast every minute.
Then there is the Café des Westens in Kuerfuerstendamm, the old one, where dreamers and poets congregate. It is called also Café Groessenwahn, which means that persons suffering from an exaggerated ego are conspicuous by their presence and their long hair.
At almost every table one may find a poet who has written a play that is bound to enrich its author and any man of means who will put up the money to build a new theater in which to produce it.
Saxony and Thuringia are proverbial hotbeds of coffee lovers. It is said that in Saxony there are more coffee drinkers to the square inch and more cups to the single coffee bean than anywhere else upon earth. The Saxons like their coffee, but seem to be afraid it may be too strong for them. So, when over their cups, they always make certain they can see bottom before raising the steaming bowl to the lip.
Von Liebig's method of making coffee, whereby three-fourths of the quantity to be used is first boiled for ten or fifteen minutes, and the remainder added for a six-minute steeping or infusion, is religiously followed by some housekeepers. Von Liebig advocated coating the bean with sugar. In some families, fats, eggs, and egg-shells are used to settle and to clarify the beverage.
Coffee in Germany is better cooked (roasted) and more scientifically prepared than in many other European countries. In recent years, during the World War and since, however, there has been an amazing increase in the use of coffee substitutes, so that the German cup of coffee is not the pure delight it was once.
Greece. Coffee is the most popular and most extensively used non-alcoholic beverage in Greece, as it is throughout the Near East. Its annual per capita consumption there is about two pounds, two-thirds of the supply coming via Austria and France, Brazil furnishing direct the bulk of the remaining third.
Coffee is given a high or city roast, and is used almost entirely in powdered form. It is prepared for consumption principally in the Turkish demi-tasse way. Finely ground coffee is used even in making ordinary table, or breakfast, coffee. In private houses the cylindrical brass hand-grinders, manufactured in Constantinople, are mostly used. In many of the coffee houses in the villages and country towns throughout Greece and the Levant, a heavy iron pestle, wielded by a strong man, is employed to pulverize the grains in a heavy stone or marble mortar; while the poorer homes use a small brass pestle and mortar, also manufactured in Turkey.
In his The Greeks of the Present Day[371], Edmond François Valentin About says:
The coffee which is drunk in all the Greek houses rather astonishes the travellers who have neither seen Turkey nor Algeria. One is surprised at finding food in a cup in which one expected drink. Yet you get accustomed to this coffee-broth and end by finding it more savoury, lighter, more perfumed, and especially more wholesome, than the extract of coffee you drink in France.
Then About gives the recipe of his servant Petros, who is "the first man in Athens for coffee":
The grain is roasted without burning it; it is reduced to an impalpable powder, either in a mortar or in a very close-grained mill. Water is set on the fire till it boils up; it is taken off to throw in a spoonful of coffee, and a spoonful of pounded sugar for each cup it is intended to make; it is carefully mixed; the coffee pot is replaced on the fire until the contents seem ready to boil over; it is taken off, and set on again; lastly it is quickly poured into the cups. Some coffee drinkers have this preparation boiled as many as five times. Petros makes a rule of not putting his coffee more than three times on the fire. He takes care in filling the cups to divide impartially the coloured froth which rises above the coffee pot; it is the kaimaki of the coffee. A cup without kaimaki is disgraced.
When the coffee is poured out you are at liberty to drink it boiling and muddy, or cold and clear. Real amateurs drink it without waiting. Those who allow the sediment to settle down, do not do so from contempt, for they afterwards collect it with the little finger and eat it carefully.
Thus prepared, coffee may be taken without inconvenience ten times a day: five cups of French coffee could not be drunk with impunity every day. It is because the coffee of the Turks and the Greeks is a diluted tonic, and ours is a concentrated tonic.
I have met at Paris many people who took their coffee without sugar, to imitate the Orientals. I think I ought to give them notice, between ourselves, that in the great coffee-houses of Athens, sugar is always presented with the coffee; in the khans and second-rate coffee-houses, it is served already sugared; and that at Smyrna and Constantinople, it has everywhere been brought to me sugared.
Italy. In Italy coffee is roasted in a wholesale and retail way as well as in the home. French, German, Dutch, and Italian machines are used. The full city, or Italian, roast is favored. There are cafés as in France and other continental countries, and the drink is prepared in the French fashion. For restaurants and hotels, rapid filtering machines, first developed by the French and Italians, are used. In the homes, percolators and filtration devices are employed.
The De Mattia Brothers have a process designed to conserve the aroma in roasting. The Italians pay particular attention to the temperature in roasting and in the cooling operation. There is considerable glazing, and many coffee additions are used.
Like the French, the Italians make much of café au lait for breakfast. At dinner, the café noir is served.
Cafés of the French school are to be found along the Corso in Rome, the Toledo in Naples, in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuel and the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, and in the arcades surrounding the Piazza de San Marco in Venice, where Florian's still flourishes.
Netherlands. In the Netherlands, too, the French café is a delightful feature of the life of the larger cities. The Dutch roast coffee properly, and make it well. The service is in individual pots, or in demi-tasses on a silver, nickle, or brass tray, and accompanied by a miniature pitcher containing just enough cream (usually whipped), a small dish about the size of an individual butter plate holding three squares of sugar, and a slender glass of water. This service is universal; the glass of water always goes with the coffee. It is the one sure way for Americans to get a drink of water. It is the custom in Holland to repair to some open-air café or indoor coffee house for the after-dinner cup of coffee. One seldom takes his coffee in the place where he has his dinner. These cafés are many, and some are elaborately designed and furnished. One of the most interesting is the St. Joris at the Hague, furnished in the old Dutch style. The approved way of making coffee in Holland is the French drip method.
Norway and Sweden. French and German influences mark the roasting, grinding, preparing, and serving of coffee in Norway and Sweden. Generally speaking, not so much chicory is used, and a great deal of whipped cream is employed. In Norway, the boiling method has many followers. A big (open) copper kettle is used. This is filled with water, and the coffee is dumped in and boiled. In the poorer-class country homes, the copper kettle is brought to the table and set upon a wooden plate. The coffee is served directly from the kettle in cups. In better-class homes, the coffee is poured from the kettle into silver coffee pots in the kitchen, and the silver coffee pots are brought to the table. The only thing approaching coffee houses are the "coffee rooms" which are to be found in Christiania. These are small one-room affairs in which the plainer sorts of foods, such as porridge, may be purchased with the coffee. They are cheap, and are largely frequented by the poorer class of students, who use them as places in which to study while they drink their coffee.
In Russia and Switzerland, French and German methods obtain. Russia, however, drinks more tea than coffee, which by the masses is prepared in Turkish fashion, when obtainable. Usually, the coffee is only a cheap "substitute." The so-called café à la Russe of the aristocracy, is strong black coffee flavored with lemon. Another Russian recipe calls for the coffee to be placed in a large punch bowl, and covered with a layer of finely chopped apples and pears; then cognac is poured over the mass, and a match applied.
Roumania and Servia drink coffee prepared after either the Turkish or the French style, depending on the class of the drinker and where it is served. Substitutes are numerous.
In Spain and Portugal the French type of café flourishes as in Italy. In Madrid, some delightful cafés are to be found around the Puerto del Sol, where coffee and chocolate are the favorite drinks. The coffee is made by the drip process, and is served in French fashion.
Coffee Manners and Customs in North America
The introduction of coffee and tea into North America effected a great change in the meal-time beverages of the people. Malt beverages had been succeeded by alcoholic spirits and by cider. These in turn were supplanted by tea and coffee.
Canada. In Canada, we find both French and English influences at work in the preparation and serving of the beverage; "Yankee" ideas also have entered from across the border. Some years back (about 1910) A. McGill, chief chemist of the Canadian Inland Revenue Department, suggested an improvement upon Baron von Liebig's method, whereby Canadians might obtain an ideal cup of coffee. It was to combine two well-known methods. One was to boil a quantity of ground coffee to get a maximum of body or soluble matter. The other was to percolate a similar quantity to get the needed caffeol. By combining the decoction and the infusion, a finished beverage rich in body and aroma might be had. Most Canadians continue to drink tea, however, although coffee consumption is increasing.
Mexico. In Mexico, the natives have a custom peculiarly their own. The roasted beans are pounded to a powder in a cloth bag which is then immersed in a pot of boiling water and milk. The vaquero, however, pours boiling water on the powdered coffee in his drinking cup, and sweetens it with a brown sugar stick.
Among the upper classes in Mexico the following interesting method obtains for making coffee:
Roast one pound until the beans are brown inside. Mix with the roasted coffee one teaspoonful of butter, one of sugar, and a little brandy. Cover with a thick cloth. Cool for one hour; then grind. Boil one quart of water. When boiling, put in the coffee and remove from fire immediately. Let it stand a few hours, and strain through a flannel bag, and keep in a stone jar until required for use; then heat quantity required.
United States. In no country has there been so marked an improvement in coffee making as in the United States. Although in many parts, the national beverage is still indifferently prepared, the progress made in recent years has been so great that the friends of coffee are hopeful that before long it may be said truly that coffee making in America is a national honor and no longer the national disgrace that it was in the past.
Left, copper pot with wooden handle and iron legs designed to stand in the coals—Center, glass-globe pot, for stove use, enclosed in felt-lined brass cosey—Right, hand-made hammered-brass kettle for stove use]
Already, in the more progressive homes, and in the best hotels and restaurants, the coffee is uniformly good, and the service all that it should be. The American breakfast cup is a food-beverage because of the additions of milk or cream and sugar; and unlike Europe, this same generous cup serves again as a necessary part of the noonday and evening meals for most people.
One effect of prohibition has been to lead many hotels to feature their coffee service, bringing back the modern type of coffee room illustrated above]
The important and indispensable part that sugar plays in the make-up of the American cup of coffee was ably set forth by Fred Mason,[372] vice-president of the American Sugar Refining Co., when he said:
The coffee cup and the sugar bowl are inseparable table companions. Most of us did not realize this until the war came, with its attendant restrictions on everything we did, and we found that the sugar bowl had disappeared from all public eating places. No longer could we make an unlimited number of trips to the sugar bowl to sweeten our coffee; but we had to be content with what was doled out to us with scrupulous care—a quantity so small at times that it gave only a hint of sweetness to our national beverage.
Then it was that we really appreciated how indispensable the proper amount of sugar was to a good, savory cup of coffee, and we missed it as much as we would seasoning from certain cooked foods. Secretly we consoled ourselves with the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless war days.
Since sugar is so necessary to our enjoyment of this popular beverage, it is obvious that a considerable part of all the sugar we consume must find its way into the national coffee cup. The stupendous amount of 40,000,000,000 cups of coffee is consumed in this country each year. Taking two teaspoonfuls or two lumps as a fair average per cup, we find that about 800,000,000 pounds of sugar, almost one-tenth of our total annual consumption, are required to sweeten Uncle Sam's coffee cup. This is specially significant when one considers that, with the single exception of Australia, the United States consumes more sugar per capita than any country on earth.
Sugar adds high food value to the stimulative virtues of coffee. The beverage itself stimulates the mental and physical powers, while the sugar it contains is fuel for the body and furnishes it with energy. Sugar is such a concentrated food that the amount used by the average person in two cups of coffee is enough to furnish the system with more energy than could be derived from 40 oysters on the half-shell.
Since prohibition, the average citizen is drinking one hundred more cups of coffee a year than he did in the old days; and a good part of the increase is attributed to newly formed habits of drinking coffee between meals, at soda fountains, in tea and coffee shops, at hotels, and even in the homes. In other words, the increase is due to coffee drinking that directly takes the place of malt and spirituous liquors. There have come into being the hotel coffee room; the custom of afternoon coffee drinking; and free coffee-service in many factories, stores, and offices.
In colonial days, must or ale first gave way to tea, and then to coffee as a breakfast beverage. The Boston "tea party" clinched the case for coffee; but in the meantime, coffee was more or less of an after-dinner function, or a between-meals drink, as in Europe. In Washington's time, dinner was usually served at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at informal dinner parties the company "sat till sunset—then coffee."
In the early part of the nineteenth century, coffee became firmly intrenched as the one great American breakfast beverage; and its security in this position would seem to be unassailable for all time.
Today, all classes in the United States begin and end the day with coffee. In the home, it is prepared by boiling, infusion or steeping, percolation, and filtration; in the hotels and restaurants, by infusion, percolation, and filtration. The best practise favors true percolation (French drip), or filtration.
Steeping coffee in American homes (an English heirloom) is usually performed in a china or earthenware jug. The ground coffee has boiling water poured upon it until the jug is half full. The infusion is stirred briskly. Next, the jug is filled by pouring in the remainder of the boiling water, the infusion is again stirred, then permitted to settle, and finally is poured through a strainer or filter cloth before serving.
When a pumping percolator or a double glass filtration device is used, the water may be cold or boiling at the beginning as the maker prefers. Some wet the coffee with cold water before starting the brewing process.
For genuine percolator, or drip coffee, French and Austrian china drip pots are mostly employed. The latest filtration devices are described in chapter XXXIV.
The Creole, or French market, coffee for which New Orleans has long been famous is made from a concentrated coffee extract prepared in a drip pot. First, the ground coffee has poured over it sufficient boiling water thoroughly to dampen it, after which further additions of boiling water, a tablespoonful at a time, are poured upon it at five minute intervals. The resulting extract is kept in a tightly corked bottle for making café au lait or café noir as required. A variant of the Creole method is to brown three tablespoonfuls of sugar in a pan, to add a cup of water, and to allow it to simmer until the sugar is dissolved; to pour this liquid over ground coffee in a drip pot, to add boiling water as required, and to serve black or with cream or hot milk, as desired.
In New Orleans, coffee is often served at the bedside upon waking, as a kind of early breakfast function.
The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 served to introduce the Vienna café to America. Fleischmann's Vienna Café and Bakery was a feature of our first international exposition. Afterward, it was transferred to Broadway, New York, where for many years it continued to serve excellent coffee in Vienna style next door to Grace Church.
The opportunity is still waiting for the courageous soul who will bring back to our larger cities this Vienna café or some Americanized form of the continental or sidewalk café, making a specialty of tea, coffee, and chocolate.
The old Astor House was famous for its coffee for many years, as was also Dorlon's from 1840 to 1922.
Members of the family of the late Colonel Roosevelt began to promote a Brazil coffee-house enterprise in New York in 1919. It was first called Café Paulista, but it is now known as the Double R coffee house, or Club of South America, with a Brazil branch in the 40's and an Argentine branch on Lexington Avenue. Coffee is made and served in Brazilian style; that is, full city roast, pulverized grind, filtration made; service, black or with hot milk. Sandwiches, cakes, and crullers are also to be had.
One of New York's newest clubs is known as the Coffee House. It is in West Forty-fifth Street, and has been in existence since December, 1915, when it was opened with an informal dinner, at which the late Joseph H. Choate, one of the original members, outlined the purpose and policies of the club.
The founders of the Coffee House were convinced—as the result of the high dues and constantly increasing formality and discipline in the social clubs in New York—that there was need here for a moderate-priced eating and meeting place, which should be run in the simplest possible way and with the least possible expense.
At the beginning of its career, the club framed, adopted, and has since lived up to, a most informal constitution: "No officers, no liveries, no tips, no set speeches, no charge accounts, no RULES."
The membership is made up, for the most part, of painters, writers, sculptors, architects, actors, and members of other professions. Members are expected to pay cash for all orders. There are no proposals of candidates for membership. The club invites to join it those whom it believes to be in sympathy with the ideals of its founders.
The method of preparing coffee for individual service in the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, which has been adopted by many first-class hotels and restaurants that do not serve urn-made coffee exclusively, is the French drip plus careful attention to all the contributing factors for making coffee in perfection, and is thus described by the hotel's steward: