The Story Of Coffee

By Carl Holliday (Dean of Toledo University)

From American Cookery Magazine November, 1919

Now that alcoholic drinks are under the ban, doubtless Americans will consume more coffee than every before, and there may even be a revival of the old-time coffee-houses. Three hundred and sixty-five years ago, this autumn, the first coffee-house in the world was opened at Constantinople, and two hundred and seventy years ago the first English coffee-house sent forth its aroma at Oxford. And yet, in the brief space of three centuries, how the coffee-drinking habit has spread? The whole world drinks it now --- enormous quantities of it. The year before the Great War, Germany, supposedly a land devoted to beer, drank, as merely an extra beverage, 412,000,000 pounds of coffee; while France, which every American soldier knows is the home of vin rouge, consumed in the coal – black for that a Frenchman loves, over 22,000,000 pounds. But the United States surpassed them all, as usual, by gulping down, in true American fashion, nearly 990,000,000 pounds.

For, at least, a half-century, however, the habit had a struggle for existence. It seems that the custom of using the beverage had its origin in Abyssinia. About 1500 a Mufti of Aden, named Gemaledie, requested those fanatic churchmen of the East, the dervishes, to drink it in order that they might not relax in the long and weird ceremonies of their faith. The dervishes took to it like a cat to cream, and recommended the concoction so heartily and widely that, within a decade, the habit had spread to Mecca and Cairo. In fact, it grew so dangerously popular that in 1511 an assembly of Mohammedan theologians condemned it on the ground that it led to intoxication, ad was, therefore, contrary to the Koran.

But these wise guardians of the faith struck a snag. The Sultan of Egypt had become a “coffee-fiend,” and when he called together another council of theologians, these gentlemen knew exactly what to do. They recommended coffee as a gift from Allah. And the people gladly accepted Allah’s gift; everybody wanted a cup. Thus it happened that the some enterprising Turk opened the world’s first coffee-house in Constantinople in the fall of 1554.

Evidently, however, these resorts became entirely too popular, for the riffraff of the town as well as the Four Hundred congregated in them, and loud was the cry of the Mohammedan churchmen against the places. Late in the sixteenth century the theologians once more demanded the extermination of the beverage, because the Koran condemned the use of “coal”! This proves that the Turks took theirs black. The Mufti of Constantinople saw the logic of the theologians’ argument, and closed every shop and hotel dispensing coffee.

What happened? The Mufti promptly lost his job, and his successor declared that coffee, if not roasted black, was certainly not coal, and, therefore, the drinking of coffee made from good brown berries was not contrary to the Koran. It reminds of the modern argument as to whether “2.75 per cent” beer is beer and, therefore, illegal.

Up the coast of Europe the rich odor of the coffee-pot crept, and the English sniffed it from afar and with relish. It was being served in London inns in Shakespeare’s time, not in cups, but in shallow bowls; so that one long asked for a “dish”: of coffee. Evidently the students as Oxford University needed something to stimulate them in their studies; for it was in that old town, in 1649 the first genuine English coffee-house was established.

What a world of romance and literary history centerers about those English coffee houses! They spread all over the island; London alone is said to have had three thousand in Dryden’s time. Some, such as Will’s Coffee-House, will go down in the annals of letters as the gathering places of the most brilliant wits and dramatists and poets the British Empire ever produced., In these cafes, with their open fronts in summer and their huge log fires in winter, one might have found Dryden, Pope, Gay, Shadwell, all the celebrities of the day. Here jokes and puns and epigrams bombarded the air; here new dramas were planned; here satires were written that drove authors back to Grub Street in disgrace and poverty.

At first no woman thought of entering such a place; it was a sanctuary for men only. But at length, the ladies began to come --- probably to see if their husbands were there --- and as the feminine mind of the seventeenth century was interested intensely in play-writing and similar literary feats, cards were introduced for their benefit. Then came a rampage of gambling; women literally went wild over it. Husbands suddenly found themselves ruined through the gambling debts of their wives; ladies of good families committed suicide because of such losses; on woman, it is recorded, wagered the very clothes off her back and had to retire to an upper chamber while considerate friends went out and borrowed a few garments for her.,

In 1675 Charles II ordered every British coffee-house closed and even imprisoned several of the proprietors; but the institutions soon returned to life, and continued their downward career until, at least, the close of the seventeenth century. And thereby hangs a tale. For the more respectable writers and intellectuals, wishing a quiet resort fell into the practice of renting exclusively a coffee-house for a night, and then for a wee or a month, until, unwittingly, certain of such gathering-places became almost private, and all who were not of the elect learned to stay away. And thus originated the famous London clubs, those assemblies of eighteenth-century master-minds, such as Addison and Steele, Johnson and his faithful Boswell, Garric the actor, Reynolds the painter, and poor, vanity-stricken, ugly, loveable Goldsmith.

What poems, what plays, what essays, came from those rooms so fragrant with the aroma of hot coffee! And all this because some whirling dervish began to swallow boiled “coal” in the year 1500.

Nowadays most of our Mocha and Java come from Brazil, and Amsterdam burgonmaster named Wieser is responsible for that. For he it was who brought some plants to the Botanical Garden of his city, and their offspring were transferred to the Paris Botanical Garden, whence the coffee-planat came to Martinique in 1720. Many substitutes have been offered for the beverage; physicians have raised shrill cries of warning against it; but during the last hundred years the coffee-pot has steadily grown in favor in America, and it steaming contents may justly be called our national drink.