But I saw none of this. I arrived in Vienna late on December 25. The train station at Westbanhopf was deserted. I wandered for an hour among the city’s grand old buildings, so clean and well kept, so sterile and empty—so different from Turkey or Yemen or India. Everything was a hundred years old but looked like it had been built yesterday. The streets were immaculate. Empty streetcars rolled by. But no people. You would have thought the city had been abandoned.
THAT WAS PRETTY MUCH THE SITUATION BY THE SECOND MONTH of the Ottoman siege. Everybody who could, including King Leopold, had fled. Vienna’s population had dwindled to seventeen thousand. There was nothing to eat. Plague broke out. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks were digging a series of secret tunnels and planting explosives under the city walls.
What the Turkish leaders did not know was that an army of about fifty thousand mainly Polish soldiers was approaching the city. They also were unaware that the Viennese knew all about the tunnels, thanks in part to a spy named Franz Kolschitzky. Kolschitzky had lived in Istanbul and could pass for a Turkish soldier. After the Viennese learned when the Turks planned to blow up the walls, he managed to get through the Turkish lines and inform the Polish generals.
On September 8, the Turks blew up their tunnels, breaching Vienna’s walls in four separate spots. In poured the Turks. The Viennese held out until evening, when, during a final attack by the Turkish elite troops, the Poles set off a huge fireworks display from a nearby hill and attacked. The fact that they were outnumbered six to one did not matter as much as it might have, because the sultan had focused all his resources on the city, leaving his rear unguarded. The Poles rushed in and spread havoc. Night fell. When they woke up, considerably worried that once the surprise was over, they’d get massacred, the Poles found the Turks had fled. Three hundred years of Islamic expansionism had come to a screeching halt.
It was a historical turning point, although not for the obvious reason. Among the twenty-five thousand camels the Turks had left behind, the Viennese found dozens of bags of mysterious green beans. Everyone thought they were camel food. But the spy Kolschitzky recognized them as coffee beans and, when asked to name his reward for his role in saving the city, he asked for nothing more than said bags of coffee, with which he intended to open Vienna’s first coffeehouse. Later he decided the city should also give him a building in which to house his café. Later still, he requested some start-up money. Some indentured servants to work as waiters? The keys to the queen’s chastity belt?
“KOLSCHITZKY WAS A SPY AND A FRAUD, A MISER AND A CHEAT— so some say.” Herr Diglas brightened up. “But a good story is always worth something.”
The Viennese take their food history seriously, and Kolschitzky’s role in the creation of the city’s café society had recently been the subject of considerable debate. The accepted version had always been that Kolschitzky used the abandoned coffee beans to open Vienna’s first café, the Blue Bottle. However, some historians—including Herr Diglas, a pear-shaped café proprietor who heads the Viennese Coffeehouse Association— contend that there were actually half a dozen spies involved and that the first official coffeehouse was opened by a spook named Johnannes Diodato.
Whatever. The important thing is not who opened the first Viennese coffeehouse but what they did there, for it was in these cafés that the Turkish habit of leaving grounds in one’s coffee ended. The events surrounding this milestone are lost in the mists of time. We can only speculate that it was in response to those oh-so-fastidious Viennese finding UFOs—Unidentified Floating Objects—in their morning cup.
According to Diglas, Vienna is also where adding milk or cream in coffee first became common. This, however, is conjecture. All we know is that it was a European innovation, because the Turks (like the Hindus) believed that combining milk with coffee caused leprosy. We also know that early London coffee society did not generally use milk. This leaves the Italians or the Viennese as the most likely innovators, since both were among the earliest coffee drinkers in continental Europe.3 Diglas pointed out that the two countries have milk-based brews, both completely different but bearing similar names— cappuccino from Italy, and Vienna’s kapuziner.
“The elderly ladies, some still know of this drink, da kapuziner,” Diglas said. “They come in and ask for one and they know exactly what they want—just the right shade of brown, like a monk’s robe.” He shrugged. “Ahhh, but I think of all my waiters only one knows what that drink is now. Too young, it goes, it is forgotten…”
He called over an elderly waiter and asked him if he knew how to make a kapuziner. Negative. Nobody in Diglas’s café, a classically Viennese establishment full of people drinking coffee and gorging on sumptuous cakes, knew how to make the drink. Bear in mind, these waiters are men in their fifties and sixties who know how to brew Vienna’s over twenty types of coffee drinks.
“Besides, there is no recipe, you know,” Diglas said. “It is just the color. You must know the exact shade of the monk’s robe, and the amount of milk will vary according to the strength of the bean.”
The monks Diglas mentioned are from the Capuchin order of the Catholic Church, the namesake for both kapuziner and cappuccino. The story of how the order became associated with the drink begins in the Italian village of Assisi. It was here, around 1201, that a fellow named Giovanni began to act a little odd. He wandered about naked. He talked to birds. If it had happened today, he would have been institutionalized. But it was the medieval period, so he was canonized. We know him today as St. Francis of Assisi.
A religious order immediately sprang up around his teachings and just as quickly splintered into a dozen factions that spent their time pooh-poohing each other. Then came little Matteo da Bascio. He was a quiet Franciscan monk who loved St. Francis and his poverty and his birds and his simplicity. One day the ghost of St. Francis visited him to complain about his order’s decadent behavior. What grabbed Matteo’s attention, however, was the saint’s outfit—he was wearing a pointed hood, not the square one mandated by the order. Outraged, Matteo petitioned the Vatican for the right to wear a peaked hood. The pope acquiesced. The other Franciscans, however, were furious with his new holier-than-thou habit and threw Matteo into a dungeon. Matteo refused to give up his new hat. The Franciscans, in turn, refused to let him go. It grew so ridiculous that the pope intervened and created a completely new order just for Matteo, thus liberating him from Franciscan authority.
And so was born the Capuchin order, cap meaning hat or hood in Italian, a reference to the pointed hood Matteo was fond of and, later, to the “cap” of whipped cream or steamed milk (perhaps we should call it a halo?) that crowns the cappuccino. Vienna’s kapuziner, however, has no cap and was supposedly created when a local member of this fashion-conscious order added milk to his coffee so it would match his dark brown robe. When I made inquiries about this at Vienna’s Capuchin monastery, I was rudely told to go away.
“We are not a coffee chain. Do you understand?” sputtered an agitated monk. “We are a religious order!”
The Capuchins are irked by the whole business because they think the cappuccino’s head of whipped cream (or steamed milk) insults their order by implying that a Capuchin monk is an airhead.
“A cappuccino is no joking matter here in Vienna,” Diglas explained when I told him about the monk’s reaction. “We take our coffee very, very seriously..”
My friend the Countess, whom I met the next day, agreed.
“YOU SEE, HOW YOU TAKE A THING EES AS IMPORTANT AS vat you take—Americans tink to dreenk der cappucheeno like a Coca-Cola. No!” The Countess flicked her spoon contemptuously at my cup. Lumps of dirty whipped cream drifted about a gray sea of espresso. Shards of melted chocolate oozed over the cup’s lip. “Dis ees de drink of de royal Hapsburg family. And look vat you have done!”
I met the Countess, my nickname for her, in Café Demel, a place that prides itself on serving cappuccino exactly as at the turn of the century: strong brewed coffee, not espresso, a howl of c
hocolate shavings, and a dome of schlagober (whipped cream) on a silver platter. The Countess had been so horrified by my attempt to consume this concoction that she volunteered to give me a lesson.
“You Americans have been spoiled by zee straw,” she said. The Countess looked a bit like Vienna herself, old but beautiful, or at least well maintained. Certainly rich. But cruel, especially about the mouth, the lips of which were lacquered to a Porsche-like gloss. Pearls gleamed milky white among the family of small animals draped about her neck.
One of Café Demel’s black-clad waitresses placed a fresh cappuccino on our table, and the Countess proceeded with my lesson. First, she piled her schlagober on the coffee, sprinkling it lightly with the chocolate shavings. “You eat zo.” She made a delicate gesture with her spoon, then a vicious stabbing motion. “Not like zat. You are not killing somezing, ya?”
I’d stabbed down through the whipped cream in an attempt to blend the coffee with the cream. The proper way, according to the Countess, was to let the whipped cream melt into the coffee while you nibbled it and the chocolate shavings. When the whipped cream receded to within a half inch of the coffee, it was permissible to break the crust. You could raise the cup to your lip at this juncture. Under no circumstances, however, would you drink or allow your lips to touch the whipped cream. Instead, you inhale the elixir, sucking the coffee toward you through the schlagober and spraying a java-flavored patina upon your palate. A slight slurping sound is permissible.
“Zen, ven all is safe and zee schlagober is gone, you may drink. Zee coffee in zee cup should be like zis shade of brown, you see?
“Zee first part, ven you eat zee schlagober of the cappuccino, is like childhood, Steuart—all sveet, light, and frivolous. Zee second part is like middle age.” The Countess paused. “But I have nozing poetic to say about zat.”
She went on, “And za last is old age, black and bitter, perhaps, but maybe zee best part for zose who have developed a taste.”
ON MY LAST DAY IN VIENNA, DURING A VISIT TO THE MUNICIPAL museum, I stumbled across a portrait of the vizier who led the campaign against the city in 1683. In the painting, Kara Mustafa looks a chubby-faced fellow. Anxious. Hardly the face of a tyrant. Then again, if the painting was done as he marched back to Istanbul, Kara had had every right to look meek. The sultan gave him a dog’s welcome when they met. In fact, he had Kara strangled in front of his own family and his head stuffed.
The synergistic bond between the decline of the Ottomans and the spread of coffee did not end at the seige of Vienna. In 1670, ten years before the siege, the ingredients for every cup of coffee in the world originated from within the Ottoman Empire. The beans came from Yemen, sugar from Africa. In 1671, French minister Jean Baptiste Colbert built a sugar mill in Marseilles. Coffee, stolen from the Turks a hundred years earlier, began to flourish in the New World. By 1730, even the Turks were making their coffee with products grown in Christian-controlled territories.
Next to the vizier’s portrait in the museum hung an old Ottoman flag, a field of white emblazoned with a red crescent moon. Curiously, their flag’s crescent also became a dish representing their decline.
Back in 1683, during the Turkish siege of Vienna, a baker named Peter Wender heard a curious tick! tick! while working late at night in his basement bakery. It was the Turks digging their secret tunnels. He warned the city officials and later created a bread roll shaped like the Turks’ crescent moon to advertise his contribution to the war effort Using bread as political propaganda was quite common back then; when King Gustav Adolf II of Sweden ravaged Germany only fifty years earlier, every gingerbread in the area was soon decorated with Adolf’s face transformed into a child-eating monster.
After the Turks were defeated, it became the Viennese custom to serve Wender’s little crescent roll, called the pfizer, with morning coffee. And there it would have ended except that a century later a seventeen-year-old Viennese princess named Marie Antoinette moved to Paris to marry Louis XVI, king of France. Homesick, she insisted that the French bakers learn to make pfizer for her breakfast. The bakers added butter and yeast, and since it would have been unthinkable for a queen of France to eat anything but “French” pastry, they renamed it le croissant, which means crescent in French.
So was born the most politically loaded meal in the world— the Continental breakfast of coffee stolen from the Turks and pastry shaped to mock their flag. But when hundreds of millions of Europeans begin their day with the combo, they are doing more than unwittingly commemorating the Turkish defeat at Vienna. They are participating in a rite that lies at the heart of the most profound pharmacological revolution in European history.
1The tea equivalent to crema is “Cream of the Fragrant Dust,” a light froth created when powdered tea is beaten vigorously.
2 Murad was given a facetious honor by the seventeenth-century English coffeehouse Ye Great Coffee House, which issued coffee tokens bearing a picture of his head and the inscription “Morat ye Great Men did mee call/Where Eare I came I conquer’d all.” These coffee tokens were one of the first examples of private currency and were accepted as cash in the immediate neighborhood until the government banned them outright.
3 There is a 1625 etching from Cairo showing what appears to be milk and coffee combined. The practice, however, was almost nonexistent.
the Revolution
In a coffee house just now among the rabble I bluntly asked, which is the treason table.
Malone, 1618
BY THE TIME THE TURKS HAD abandoned those bags of beans at the gates of Vienna, coffee had made cameo appearances in the ports of Venice, London, France, and Holland. The first written reference to it being consumed by a European occurs in correspondence dated 1615, but it’s unlikely that even the most intrepid gourmands were tippling it regularly before the middle of the century.
To appreciate the significance of this new recreational drug, however, you first have to appreciate what redneck backwater Europe was four hundred years ago. There were no books. Fewer movies. The music was awful. And the food… Pepper was unknown, salt rare, and sugar had just made a debut. Basically, it was a lot like Nebraska on a slow weekend—church or beer. Europeans, however, had the sense to combine the two. Paris in 1660 had over one hundred religious holidays and every one of them culminated in the marathon drinking competitions so popular then. “They must swallow half, then all of a drink in one gulp without stopping to take a single breath,” wrote one German in 1599, “until they sink into a complete stupor…(then) the two heroes emerge and guzzle in competition with one another.”
Drinking raised your social status, hence the phrase “drunk as a lord.” Toasting was a way of displaying your wealth. He who drank the most was also rewarded with the piece of toasted bread floated in the glass (hence the name). The writer Fortunatus considered these toasting competitions tantamount to suicide, with participants “carrying on like madmen, each competing in drinking to the other’s health…so that a man had to consider himself lucky to come away with his life.” At night, Europe’s cities were full of drunkards “weaving from side to side, stumbling and staggering, falling into the mud, their legs splayed out wide enough for a coach to pass through.”
Beer was not only the main means of celebrating, it was second only to bread as a source of nourishment. Every housewife baked bread, every housewife brewed beer. “People subsist more on this drink than they do on food,” wrote Placutomus in 1551.
Beer thickened with eggs and poured over bread was the original Continental breakfast and remained popular in Germany until the mid-1700s. Since hot beverages were rare and water unsafe, workers took midmorning beer breaks. Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner, and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children, drank three liters of beer a day. That’s almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five lite
rs of strong ale a day (as much alcohol as about seven six-packs, or about forty cans). Monks in Sussex made do with twelve cans’ worth.
Almost everything had some liquor in it, especially medicines. Anything that wasn’t deliberately fermented went off in the summer heat. In the winter, the beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor. We can be sure the resulting moonshine did not go to waste. To make matters worse, the main nonalcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hungover generals: the plague, famine, and war. Add a pope on acid, and medieval Christianity starts to make a whole lot of sense.
So it’s no surprise that booze was one of Martin Luther’s first targets when he set about reforming the Catholic Church in the mid-1500s. Followers like the Capuchins printed posters of a drunken demon with a pig’s head and bird’s claws, the original “Demon Alcohol,” and banned drinking contests. The only reaction was the formation of Europe’s first temperance league, a group of Germans whose members limited themselves to a mere seven glasses of wine per meal. Otherwise, Europe staggered along as it always had. Doctors continued to advise patients to drink themselves unconscious at least “once a month…as it stimulates general well-being.” One third of England’s farmland was dedicated to growing barley for beer; one in seven buildings was a tavern.
Martin Luther’s attempts to limit drinking failed because he had offered no alternative. Then came the great Ottoman coffee suppression of the 1640s and, within ten years, Europe’s first coffeehouse opened in Oxford, England.1 Cafés soon appeared in London, where, coincidentally, the Puritans had just seized control of Parliament.
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