Coffee and me

"As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energise the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleaguered in the middle of the night." Amor Towles - A Gentleman in Moscow

I actually started this post a few days ago, having just finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow and remembering, amongst others, the quote above. It's an absolutely wonderful book and I highly recommend it. A bit fairytale like I suppose but magical like a fairytale.

But I didn't get very far for a number of reasons, and then in the last couple of days I was reading through Maeve O'Mara's Italian Food Safari - my recent op shop present, when I came across the final chapter simply entitled 'Coffee'. There are a couple of other things I will say about this book but let's stick to the coffee for now.

A lot of Gentleman in Moscow is centred on food and the memories it evokes and somehow or other these two readings have recalled some of my coffee memories.

I grew up in England where everyone drank tea and probably still do. I didn't like tea - or milk, so probably mostly just drank water. I don't think I had much contact with coffee on my teenage visits to France either. Although I do remember I and my exchange friends and their brothers and sister, being allowed to dunk a large cube of sugar into their parents' coffee in the evening. The coffee would be sucked out of the sugar and then the sugar was eaten. A simple demonstration of the fact that if you have coffee you need something sweet to go with it. Which is why I was so disappointed recently at that visit to a local café where there were no delectable cakes to go with the coffee.

"having poured the coffee, he began to enjoy the morning's sensations to their fullest:

The crisp sharpness of the apple ...

the hot bitterness of the coffee ... The savoury sweetness of the biscuit with its hint of spoiled butter ...

So perfect was the combination that upon finishing, the Count was tempted to crank the crank, quarter the apple, dole out the biscuits, and enjoy his breakfast all over again." Amor Towles - a Gentleman in Moscow

The smell of coffee is so amazingly wonderful too is it not? Not just the coffee when made, but also, and perhaps even more - the smell of roasting coffee beans. And here is a personal memory which I find hard to believe. When I lived in East Ham - I was eight when we left there - so very young - I remember a shop in town where they used to roast coffee - the smell was amazing. I find the memory hard to believe in because I am talking literally post=war England when we were deep in rationing times. Surely there would not have been anyone roasting coffee beans in London's outer East End? But I remember that smell so clearly. Here is how Amor Towles describes it (in an equally difficult time - Bolshevik Russia):

"when the Count opened the small wooden drawers the grinder, the world and all it contained were transformed by that envy of the alchemists - the aroma of freshly ground coffee.

In that instant, darkness was separated from light, the waters from the lands, and the heavens from the earth. The trees bore fruit and the woods rustled with the movement of birds and beasts and all manner of creeping things. While closer at hand, a patient pigeon scuffed its feet on the flashing."

Maybe a little over the top and yet ...

My next encounter with coffee was at university. Up until then I hadn't really drunk coffee, but here peer group pressure took over. One was invited to fellow students' rooms - friends, potential friends, boyfriends - for a coffee. Indeed I think my first taste was on my very first afternoon there, when the older students in the corridor invited us 'freshers' in for a coffee. Or one had a coffee and sticky bun in the Student's Union with friends in the afternoon. It was a social thing. An excuse to get together. Not that this was real coffee of course. It was Nescafe or Maxwell House. And this is what I continued to drink for many years. I still have the jars to prove it - I use them to store all sorts of things in, in my pantry. The small jars in particular were very useful for storing herbs and spices - as they still do.

When I went to America with my best friend at the end of our first university year, we encountered American coffee - which at the time we thought was a step up, but looking back - it probably was not. In America - before the days of Starbucks et al. the coffee came from a percolator - we would drink it in Greyhound Bus Cafés and diners. Where food was cheap. I think it is still pretty common. The waitresses kept coming round and replenishing your cup. And when we were first married we obviously thought that percolated coffee was the real thing because we had one of them. I think I threw it out some time ago.

After university we camped with friends in what was then Yugoslavia - twice - and there we were introduced to Turkish coffee. Very sweet in itself and served with a glass of ice cold water. I don't think we often got the turkish delights but we always got the water. So enamoured did I become of the experience that I bought myself a cheap red enamel turkish coffee maker - which I still have and which I use to boil that lemon juice for mayonnaise. But for a while there I did occasionally make turkish coffee. Well I was young and in love and the taste took me back to the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean and two glorious holidays which will forever remain in my memory. Including the occasion when Sue and I were left in a beachfront café whilst our boyfriends (now husbands) went off to have a hair cut. And we sat and sat for well over an hour, with no money for more coffee after a second cup. It became quite embarrassing, but we couldn't move or we would lose our men. They would not know where we were. No mobile phones back then. When they returned cock-a-hoop and completely unaware of the problem they had caused, they recounted how they had had a wonderful time being pampered with all sorts of unnecessary 'beauty' treatments. Yugoslavia back then was amazingly cheap. I think they devalued their currency twice whilst we were there. We were there for a month and the whole holiday including the cost of repairing the back axle of the car after a minor crash was a princely £22 - around $1,000 in today's money I have just discovered. So perhaps not quite as cheap as I thought at the time. I think that trip to the hairdresser started my husband's desire to always have a haircut when in France though.

After marriage we progressed through various methods of making coffee - the aforesaid percolator, to filter coffee which was all the rage for a while, We still have one of them, to the plunger - still used for large groups of people and now to an espresso machine, which grinds the coffee and does it all. And then, of course, there is the Aldi Expressi machine which uses the notorious capsules - modern day Nescafe if you will - which is up in the Gatehouse. But then it was Nescafe who began that particular boom with their Nespresso brand.

Coffee today is a thing here in Melbourne, which sometimes dares to suggest it is the coffee capital of the world. You can certainly get it everywhere from high end restaurants to the station platform and McCafé. Real espresso coffee that is.

Well - I have no idea how many different kinds of coffee you can get now, but it's lots. Put ten people round a table in a café and you will probably have ten different requests for different coffees. My Italian Food Safari claims, of course, that only the Italians understand coffee. And Melbourne's status in the coffee ranks certainly stems from the Italians of Lygon Street. I remember Robert Dessaix saying, in one of his books, that whilst in Italy he found it hard to get a decent cup of coffee and longed for Lygon Street and its plethora of choice. I imagine the Italians of Italy would be deeply hurt to hear this. Not the Italians of Melbourne though.

In Italy the choice is certainly not as large as it is here. According to Italian Food Safari there are really just four kinds of coffee:

"Espresso - otherwise known as 'short black'

Ristretto - restricted to 15-20 ml - a stronger, shorter coffee

Corretto - 'corrected' with a dash of alcohol, usually grappa

Macchiato - the word means to stain or mark the espresso, either with a slight dash of cold or hot milk or half a teaspoon of frothed milk"

And the Italians, outside of home, mostly drink it standing up at the bar - it costs more to sit down and drink it. But there are more kinds that you can get in Italy - Americano - which is what we know as a long black and probably despised by the Italians - it shows in the name. I'm afraid this is what I usually go for. And Cappuccino - which they only drink in the morning. Apparently you should never drink coffee with milk after lunch.

At home mind you they make it with those little implements with a top and a bottom that you screw together. As do the French. I have never acquired one of these - well I do have a vague memory of having one - but I never mastered the technique and so if I had one I must have thrown it out. I do have friends who swear by it though. One of the things against it, it seems to me, is that they make such a small amount. I know we have sometimes come across them in France and Italy in our rented holiday homes, and we have usually not used them because nobody would know what to do with them. So we resorted to just mixing hot water and ground coffee in some sort of container and then straining it into cups. Primitive but it works. Sort of.

My last coffee related memory is of my au pair days in Grenoble. By then I was a bit of a coffee addict in the morning. I still am. I need that coffee first thing when I wake up and these days my wonderful husband brings it to me with some toast and jam, or a crumpet or croissant and jam. It is a truly wonderful thing to wake up to.

But going back to France. The French, for breakfast have very large cups - almost soup size - of very milky coffee. I think in my teenage years this would have been hot chocolate. But by the time I was 20 I was used to drinking my coffee black and so I would have this very large mug of very black coffee to wake me up. I am not a morning person - and it amused my employers hugely.

In Italy Guy Grossi maintains that children drink coffee in the morning from a very early age.

"In the morning the leftover coffee from the night before would be mixed with milk - half and half - and that would be warmed up and you'd get a big cup of it with some cake or something sweet to dip in. That was breakfast, and that's the original cafe latte - coffee and milk mixed together. We drank that from a very young age. Then as you grow up, you have your first cappuccino and the rest is history." Guy Grossi

So just to finish off a couple of tips I gained from the Italian Food Safari - from one Aldo Cozzi - a coffee merchant.

"For plunger coffee, add the coffee and then some cold water to just cover it before adding the hot water - this gives a much better flavour.

Buy blended coffee rather than single origin - the taste is more complex and pleasing."

Interesting.