Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  Within five years, however, another Armenian, heedless of Pascal’s failure, made a fresh trial, opening a small Turkish coffee-house in the Rue Férou. That he might not be wholly dependent upon the purveying of coffee, he sold tobacco as well. His name was Maliban. After a time, he migrated to Holland, and a Christianized Persian named Gregor, who had been his assistant, took over the Paris business.

  Gregor remembered that in his own country there was an intimate connexion between coffee and literature. Why not in Paris, too? There must be a spirit hidden away in the coffee-bean akin to artistic inspiration. Would it not be a good move to transplant the coffee-house to the Rue Mazarin, close to the Comédie Française? That theatre was then the centre of the fashionable world—far more so than the very exclusive court of the Roi Soleil at Versailles. Theatre-goers were great talkers; they talked about plays, actors, first nights; they gossiped and put on airs; they liked a “salon.” It was a bright thought of Gregor’s to establish himself so near the Comédie Française, and he gave a genial welcome to the gossips who looked in during the entr’acte and when the performance was over. Although Gregor’s “refreshment-room” was not directly connected with the theatre, it was sufficiently linked to follow the Comédie Française when that institution moved to new quarters. Now, therefore, in 1689, was founded the first theatre café.

  Since Gregor did not go bankrupt, imitators were encouraged. The original coffee-house that the Persian had taken over from Maliban had been transferred to a fellow-countryman named Makar. In Persian, “makar” means “happy,” or “fortunate.” Makar the coffee-house keeper, however, won so little good fortune from the sale of coffee that, suffering from nostalgia, he quitted Paris and France for ever. He lacked the felicity and adroitness of the smooth-tongued Gregor, who could hold his own among the popes of literature as if to the manner born, could converse with the disciples of Boileau about “unity of place,” and could chatter with the respective admirers of Racine and Corneille while serving them with coffee. Even had Makar been able to hold his own among such customers, he could not attract them to his out-of-the-way establishment. When he left, his successor was a Fleming known as the “Man of Ghent.”

  COFFEE-POT WITH SPIRIT LAMP AND EXTINGUISHER

  (Louis XIV)

  Prior to the year 1700, very few Parisians by birth had become coffeehouse keepers. The occupation had still an alien flavour. An acquaintanceship with literature, the friendship between the Black Apollo and the “periwigs,” did not suffice, as yet, to give a café the necessary smack of the French soil. That could not happen until—as was not far off—the whole great nation became a literary one, and until coffee had become the chief nutriment of French brains.

  About the year 1690, a little man with a limp came to settle in Paris. He was a Greek from Crete, which was then under Turkish rule, and he became generally known as “the Candiot.” Lacking funds to open a coffee-house, he made a virtue of necessity, inventing a new trade, hawking hot coffee from door to door. He wore a clean white apron, which set off the brown of his face and hands. On one arm he carried a little brazier surmounted by a coffee-pot, and as he walked he sang, in his native tongue, a song which, translated, may have run much as follows:

  O drink that I love,

  Rule by right divine!

  Wean the drinker from the grape;

  Far better, thou, than wine!

  Having knocked at a customer’s door, for two sous he would fill three cups. Then he limped on as quickly as he could to the next customer. Thus the aromatic odour of the black beverage was introduced into the houses of the multitude.

  “The Candiot” found imitators, one of whom was Joseph “the Levantine.” Still, this hawking of coffee from door to door in the morning like new bread did not catch on. It soon became apparent that the immediate future of the beverage did not belong to family life, not to the home, not to the four walls of the citizens; it required a more public setting.

  For, at the turn of the century, public life in France was assuming a new form, characterized by a fondness for conversation and criticism which had not been known in the baroque epoch. The Teutonic, the Franconian, characteristics of the Parisians were disappearing. These Parisians, like the other inhabitants of the Latin countries—like the Milanese, the Neapolitans, and the Marseillais—were acquiring a taste for street life on other occasions than the annual fairs. The exercise of this new taste was becoming a daily custom, and coffee played its part in breaking down the walls of the home. The talk of the streets, although it was still far from exerting a marked influence upon politics or upon business, was found, as in the South, to be enheartening. There had dawned the century at whose close civic freedom would be discovered like a new continent. In the year 1702, as a mark of changing times, the first really modern great café was opened in Paris. The founder of this “Café Procope” was Procopio di Coltello, a gentleman from Palermo who, like all the dwellers in Mediterranean ports, had made acquaintance with coffee far earlier than had the Parisians and the Viennese. Though a man of family, having fallen on evil days he made his way to Paris, and, at the age of twenty-two, became a waiter in the coffee-house of Pascal the Armenian. Three years later he married a Parisian woman named Marguerite Crouin, and by her had, as was the custom in those days, a large family: eight children. When his first wife died in 1669, Coltello married a Frenchwoman of family, and by her had four more children.

  After he had so lustily done his duty to the populating of France, and had, incidentally, given the lie to the Marseille calumnies concerning the aphrodisiac effects of coffee, it seemed to him time to disguise his foreign origin, so he called himself Couteau instead of Coltello. Soon he added to the new name the designation “maître distillateur,” and in 1702 he bought a roomy building that faced the Théâtre Français.

  This Café Procope was the prototype of all the Parisian coffee-houses of the eighteenth century. Coltello-Couteau owed his success to his having broken away from the fashionable or sometime fashionable craze of Turkish decoration. His motto was “Paris for the Parisians.” He now provided comforts which previously his customers were forced to imagine, although Paris abounded in them; he installed mirrors, candelabras, and marble-topped tables. He reinforced coffee with chocolate, liqueurs and ice, sherbet, and dainties. His establishment thus somewhat resembled the modern confectioner’s shop, a type from which, however, the café was destined to depart. Anyhow, the Café Procope was the first distinctively European coffeehouse. Starting from this focus, all France became, as the Abbé Galiani has told us, “le café de l’Europe.”

  10

  Brother Coffee

  WHEN William Harvey (1578—1657) was nearing his end, he summoned a solicitor and showed the man of law a coffee-bean. Thrusting his finger-nail caressingly into the groove of the bean, he said with a smile: “This little fruit is the source of happiness and wit!” In his will, he bequeathed to the London College of Physicians the greatest treasure in his laboratory, fifty-six pounds of coffee, directing that his colleagues, so long as the supply lasted, should assemble, month by month, to commemorate the day of his death by drinking coffee together. Only fifty-six pounds of coffee! This indicates that coffee was then consumed in very small quantities, being regarded as hardly less precious a beverage than the vinegar in which Cleopatra is fabled to have dissolved a pearl. Above all, it was looked upon as a medicine, which indeed it is.

  Harvey never dreamed that twenty years after his death London would be full of coffee-houses; or that coffee, of which he had procured a sack from Venice at great cost, would by then be brought to England in shiploads, to fill the warehouses at the docks.

  Yet nowadays we do not find it easy to associate the idea of the English with that of coffee-houses and coffee. Tea has become the typically British beverage. A reddish-gold infusion served in wide cups of eggshell porcelain—a “dish of tea.” Just as wine was the national beverage of Hellas, coffee that of the Arabs and subsequently of the French, so ha
s tea become the national beverage of the English. Yet from 1680 to 1730, for half a century, London consumed more coffee than any other city in the world. The day of tea was to come later.

  In the year 1650, the body of the English nation was in a morbid state which, it would seem, could only be cured by strong doses of trimethyldioxypurin. The vice of drunkenness, the malady of alcoholism, prevailed among all classes. The prolonged bloodshed of the Civil War had made people wish to drown their sorrows in drink. There were taverns at every turn, not only in London but in provincial towns and villages. The populace needed dope—not knowing whether, from day to day, a new dictator might rise to power, or whether—the memories of the burnings at Smithfield a century before being still vivid—the Catholics might not again win the upper hand over the Protestants. In the seaports, sailors wished to forget the miseries of long and tedious voyages, to forget the brutality of life at sea. There were taverns waiting for them directly they set foot ashore. Inland, too, drink was everywhere on sale. Violence was universal, bottles and tankards being often used as weapons.

  No writer at the close of the sixteenth century and the opening years of the seventeenth has given such lively pictures of drunkenness as those that have come down to us from Shakespeare’s hand. Shakespeare described what he had seen. He lived among men whose muscles were made out of beef, and whose breath reeked of alcohol. Not only in the case of Falstaff, but also in that of many of the playwright’s other characters, we look on with alarm, wondering whether these bloated creatures will not perish from spontaneous combustion, consumed in a blue flame of rum and gin and brandy. Besides distilled liquors, they swallowed vast quantities of heavy wines—malmsey, Canary, Madeira, sherris-sack, port, and what not. Those that could afford to buy such luxuries, of course! The young men of family who drank in the Mitre, the Falcon, or the Mermaid, could pay for the best; but the numerous poor devils whom Shakespeare likewise knew, the prototypes of Bar-dolph and Pistol, consumed other drinks. “Never before and never afterwards,” writes Brandes, “were there so many different kinds of strong drink in England. Malt liquors galore, called indifferently ale and beer, ranging down to small beer [recall the words of the drinking song, an expansion of some lines by Fletcher, the Elizabethan dramatist: ‘He who drinks small beer, and goes to bed sober, falls as the leaves do fall, and dies in rank October; but he who drinks strong beer, and goes to bed mellow, lives as he ought to live, and dies an honest fellow’]; three sorts of mead, prepared by fermenting a solution of honey; and each beverage was flavoured with some particular plant. White mead, for instance, contained rosemary, thyme, wild rose, mint, cress, fever-few, maidenhair, petunia, eyebright, campanula, holly-root, wormwood, tamarisk, and saxifrage.” The alcohol flavoured with this multifarious flora ran riot in the system. Every brain and every belly became an aquarium of craziness. These drinks were comparatively cheap, consumed mainly by common folk. For persons with a palate, who could afford to indulge it, there were fifty-six kinds of French wines and thirty-six kinds of Spanish, with Portuguese and Italian wines as well. People did not usually get drunk on these beverages in the lands of their origin. Only when they had been shipped to England did they make the consumers’ heads spin.

  It was natural enough, therefore, that Iago should say of his drinking song: “I learned it in England, where, indeed, they are most potent in potting: your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander . . . are nothing to your English.” When Cassio demurs, Iago pushes the point home, asseverating: “Why, he drinks you, with facility, your Dane dead-drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almain; he gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled.”

  Such was the world into which coffee was now introduced, at first as a medicament. For some time after its introduction it was an official preparation, kept in a drawer whose front was adorned with a scroll and to which was affixed a white porcelain label bearing the legend “Coff. arab.” At length a physician of note discovered its main quality. Walter Rumsey, who had been a pupil of Francis Bacon as well as of William Harvey, declared that coffee was able “to cure drunkards.” The chapter in which he makes this statement is characteristically entitled “Experiments of Cophee.” Every draught of coffee was then experimental. Now whereas in the France of Molière the medical profession was almost universally derided, in England at the same date physicians were held in high repute; and it was the faith of Englishmen belonging to the best circles in the dicta of physicians that gave coffee a good start in that country. The doctors declared that the new beverage was needed to cope with the frightful prevalence of drunkenness; and this appeal to the Puritan ideals that slumbered in every Briton made people pay heed to medical advice in the matter.

  Apart from the recommendation of coffee as an anti-Bacchic, Edward Pococke, Dr. Sloane, and above all the famous Radcliffe, went so far as to describe coffee as a panacea. Taken fasting, the first thing in the morning, it was of the utmost value in consumption, ophthalmia, and dropsy. Nay, it could cure gout and scurvy, even smallpox. But these polyhistors, comically ignorant despite the wealth of their knowledge, issued solemn warnings against the dilution of coffee with milk. That, they said, would involve a risk of becoming affected with leprosy. Presumably the pundits did not mean true leprosy, but only the skin disease more commonly known as psoriasis. In modern London they were as superstitious, and as much a prey to the doctrine of similars, as had been the Arabs of old. I have explained that the legend of the discovery of coffee by goats probably originated from the resemblance of coffee-beans to goats’ dung; so, now, the skin that formed on the top of coffee with milk reminded the physicians of an eruption!

  Still, that was the way in which “Brother Coffee” came to London, a very different introduction from that to Paris. The French were already hot-blooded enough, and their doctors were afraid they would become superheated. The English were cold, and their blood circulated sluggishly. Hitherto the only way of warming them up had been to dose them with alcohol. But there was another way of instilling fire into their veins. Many of them were melancholic and many of them irascible. Often wrath and gloom were combined. Now coffee came and sat down at table with them for half a century. Though it was a popular beverage, it appeared on the scene as a black-clad Puritan, wearing a Dutch broad-brimmed hat, a ruff, and white sleeves. Often the guest was smoking a short clay pipe; and, while in France Brother Coffee made people who were already sleepless more sleepless than ever, and increased the frivolousness of those who were already inclined to be frivolous, in London, when coffee came into fashion, it introduced an atmosphere of sobriety–just as if a clergyman had entered the room. “Don’t forget that you are good Christians!” . . . “Be sure and go regularly to church, and to be quite sober when you go!” . . . “Above all, behave like gentlemen, remembering that the proper place for your knife is beside your plate, and not between your neighbour’s ribs!”

  When Pascal, the Armenian who had gone bankrupt in Paris, fled by moonlight to London, he found, strangely enough, a competitor of the same name already established in the English capital. This was the Greek, Pascal Rosea; really a Greco-Venetian, for he came from Ragusa, upon which the lion of St. Mark had fixed its claws during the Middle Ages. Daniel Edwards, a London merchant, had voyaged to Smyrna, and, during the return journey, when his ship touched at Ragusa on a fine summer morning, he landed, to encounter the coffee-man Rosea, who was wearing a Greek cap. Although in Smyrna the traveller took it as a matter of course that everyone there, as throughout Asia Minor, knew how to make coffee, it was strange to meet a coffee-man when well on his way back to England. That was why Edwards thought it would be a good thing to pick up this fellow Pascal Rosea from the outskirts of the Greco-Levantine world, and take him back to London. Pascal became the Englishman’s servant, and made coffee for his master every morning. “This entirely new practice brought so many friends to visit Edwards,” writes Anderson in his History of Commerce, “that by the time afternoon came Edwards had found it nec
essary to satisfy the curiosity of all these inquisitives.” Then, as ever, coffee affected those who made its acquaintance for the first time with “loquacitate quadam,” with a marked garrulousness. Since Daniel Edwards had other work to do than to satisfy his friends’ curiosity and to provide them with coffee, he established Pascal Rosea in an open booth outside the house, where coffee was provided without any trouble to the master. The “potus niger et garrulus”–the “black and tongue-loosening drink”—migrated under supervision of Pascal Rosea from this booth into a shop. The first English coffee-house was thus opened in Cornhill, opposite St. Michael’s church, and therefore in the odour of sanctity. “The virtue of coffee-drink first publiquely made and sold in England by Pasqua Rosee” was worthy of its reputation.

  But Daniel Edwards’ protégé failed to reckon with a mighty enemy. Beer, the titan, the ruler of all northern realms, assembled his forces. Brewers and publicans were not inclined to allow liquor prepared from malt and hops to be driven off the field by the decoction from the little coffee-bean. They therefore denounced the Levantine to the Lord Mayor as being “no freeman.” Since when had there been warrant for allowing a foreigner to interfere with domestic trade? The Lord Mayor admitted that this was a nice point, and therefore installed his coachman, Bowman by name, as Pascal Rosea’s partner. The brewers, still dissatisfied, demanded that the new trade should be highly taxed. Pascal Rosea, therefore, paid an impost of one thousand sixpences per annum.

  Even this did not suffice the beer trade, and Bowman—the Greek by this time having been squeezed out of the business—was compelled to sell beer in his coffee-house as well as coffee. Nevertheless, the success of coffee was so striking that a Fleet Street barber, James Farr by name, also took to providing coffee for his customers. Thereupon the whole force of the trade (it is significant that in England “the trade” without qualification means the trade in alcoholic liquor) was marshalled against Farr. They took out a summons against him. “We hereby accuse James Farr, a barber by occupation, with boiling and selling a beverage he calls coffee; with, thereby, causing a nuisance to his neighbours by the evil stench of his brew; furthermore, that in order to prepare the drink, he keeps a fire constantly going, not only by day, but most of the night as well, which causes great danger and unnameable terrors to the whole neighbourhood.”