A Personal History of Coffee
About making and enjoying delicious coffee, especially for those who think they are too old to learn.
Do you want to love it? We all have coffee memories, whether we enjoy it or not. Photo by Nani Williams on Unsplash.
Almost everyone has a coffee journey, even if one cannot stand to drink it. The fascination began with watching adults huddle with steaming cups. They seemed oblivious to loud and misbehaving children all around. Some parents rewarded curiosity with sniffs of just-opened cans and steamy brews. Many recall revulsion at their first sip. Then came college all-nighters, and later, the moment when one drank one's first good cup of coffee. The Dictionary of the French Academy once declared that history is ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’. If this is true (alas, it isn’t), then remembering coffee encounters shows the beverage’s historical significance. Who remembers their first green beans, potatoes, or orange juice? For that matter, who can give a full narrative of their tea drinking? You get the point. Coffee, like Kinsella’s baseball, marks the years.
My earliest coffee memory comes from my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. Josephine was a little brunette German-American lady who loved her home. It was a good thing she did, having borne eleven children. She kept a clean house for my grandfather, Jess, a career staff sergeant, but the kitchen was the heart. Officers admired Josephine’s cooking. The gallant Edmund Gruber visited often during the years he ‘rolled along’ up the ranks. My mother remembered sitting on the piano bench as a young girl with Gruber. He played Stille Nacht while the adults passed around cigarettes and cups of my grandmother’s excellent coffee.
General Edmund Gruber (1879-1941) may have had his ancestor Franz’s musical talent. He wrote the ‘5th Artillery Regimental Song,’ which we know as ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along.’ My mother once told me that John Philip Sousa was an ‘odious man.’ It seems Sousa had stolen some credit for “Caissons” without giving her hero, Gruber, proper credit (or royalties). Even worse, in the 1950s, the words and title were changed to ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along.’
My memories of grandma’s kitchen included a ubiquitous metal percolator. It was right next to a brace of jade-colored Fire King coffee cups and my grandpa’s bottle of Tabasco. Warmed by the aromatic steam of the percolator, I liked to stand with my elbows on the counter. I stared at the perking coffee squirting into the glass cap for what seemed like hours. I imagined it was playing the Maxwell House Coffee song.
The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of percolators. My mother had a fashionable stovetop Corningware Cornflower coffee maker. She also had a clear Pyrex percolator, which later came into my possession. It seemed like the coffee was always on, although my Irish father never drank it. Dad preferred tea and took many opportunities to accuse the beverage as unhealthful. As a dentist, he had periodontal evidence against it that never quite convinced me. But the medical man usually concluded by saying, “it will stunt your growth!” I have to admit that this final argument made me uneasy, but lost its luster when I went away to college.
I also made a curious discovery in a kitchen cupboard as a child. Inside a couple of nested stock pots was a small octagonal aluminum object that I thought was a syrup dispenser. When I asked my mother what it was, she said, “oh, it’s a little percolator that the Italians use. Your Aunt Maria gave it to me.” My Italian Aunt Maria lived in Omaha. This Moka Pot was anything but a mere percolator.
After this first encounter, it took me more than thirty years to actually try the Moka Pot as a brewing method. Some day, I will argue for its virtues for daily use. I will do so by first recounting its history and then showing how to use the pot to make a delicious cup of coffee. Until then, svegliati e annusa il caffè!
