ON COFFEE

AN APPRECIATION.

Coffee with Federico Fellini, Caffe Canova, Piazza de Poppoli, Rome, 1991.

Coffee as a concept first entered my consciousness some time in the nineteen-sixties, at a tiny café called Quittner’s in the Sydney suburb of Double Bay. Under spreading Moreton Bay Fig trees ranged along a few winding streets, its tables offered a hint of life as it had been on Unter den Linden in Berlin or in Vienna’s most famous konditorei, Demel. Elderly gentlemen in double-breasted pin-striped suits worn shiny with use chatted with ladies of a similar vintage in couture bought perhaps direct from Chanel’s rue Cambon boutique. They drank inky black coffee from tiny cups or watched approvingly as an ancient waiter stooped to spoon stiff-whipped schlag onto their cup. 

I arrived in Europe at the height of the coffee shop vogue, when half the caffs in Soho, once content to serve milky tea in heavy white china cups, had installed massive Gaggia espresso machines to furnish cappucinos with the regulation half-cup of “froff”.  Fortunately my coffee education would continue in Paris at La Coupole and the Café du Dome, but most of all in Rome…

I wrote the following panegyric for a book about St Germain des Prés, where it appeared in slightly garbled form, due to American copy editors’ ignorance of (or indifference to) the rich diversity of the diacritic. Here it is as written.

Coffee coffee coffee.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Nescafé at dawn, drunk from a mug with a silly design; half milk  and the sugar barely dissolved, but most of it gulped  in a swallow, fuel for a morning's work…

Or a créme in the cafe on the corner of boulevard St Germain,  seething milk poured into an inky express,  black and white turning beige; water into wine.

Later in the day, cafe allongé - stretched coffee , with extra hot water instead of milk, for a cuppa Java just like they make Back Home.

Or my personal preference, noisette -  a modest express, compromised by a dash of milk; the soiled dove of coffees that Italians call macchiato - stained.   

Not forgetting the classic express,  sipped standing at the zinc  on a rainy afternoon, the Tour Eiffel a high ghost in the overcast, my neighbour companionably pushing the sugar along the bar, then returning to his dog-eared copy of Boris Vian. 

            The international language of coffee….

Coffee in Indian and Chinese restaurants, so vile it must be revenge for the Raj or the Opium Wars. 

Dutch coffee, Douwe Egberts, so mellow and milky you want to glug it, cup after cup.

Turkish coffee; powder, sugar, water -  black, gluey, gritty, a liquid confection.

Ah, but then the espresso  of Italy.

Cadillac of coffees. No, not Cadillac: Porsche.

Brown/black ichor under crema thick enough to support the pyramid of sugar from the paper tube for twothreefourfive!  seconds before it's swallowed down.

Coffee not so much drunk as inhaled. And the caffeine kick, shivering down your nerves, making your ears sing.

            And what about American coffee? 

The frowns when, on my first stateside visit, I asked for "white coffee"; the kindly explanation "Ah, you mean 'coffee regular' ".

Equal confusion in a French café at the concept of "iced coffee". Ice and coffee? An unimaginable perversion at that time, to which a baffled waiter responds by plonking down an express with an ice cube melting in it. Now, of course, an omnipresent banality, thanks to Starbucks and its Iced Frappucino;  a cappuccino drugged with vanilla, hazelnut, caramel;  coffee in drag, too timid to come out of the closet as what it really is - a milkshake.

            But Irish  coffee now. Saints preserve us! An entirely different thing.

Coffee, sugar and whisky, with a dog collar of barely pourable cream. The four food groups in a glass - sugar, caffeine, alcohol, fat. The eighth sacrament,  potent enough to raise the dead. So transcendental you'd swear it was invented in the Vatican.  In fact, someone at Shannon Airport thought it up to revive passengers stumbling off the first unpressurized,  unheated transAtlantic flights.

            Coffee coffee coffee..... No such thing as a bad cup; just some cups less good.

            Always, of course, excepting decaf.

Decaf, for God's sake! 

Decaf, the fumbled pass that loses the game;

The ball that rims the hole but doesn't quite drop; 

The orgasm you just know  was faked;

The mystery you realise on page ten you already read. 

The essence of disappointment….

Like crawling into an unmade bed;

Like not finding the matching sock.

Like ordering 'no pineapple' on your pizza but getting it just the same.

Decaf's the Coffee That Couldn't,

the coffee of What Might Have Been,

the coffee of NotReallyOurSortOfThing….  

Decaf?

I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.