The World of Caffeine (61 page)

Read The World of Caffeine Online

Authors: Bonnie K. Bealer Bennett Alan Weinberg

BOOK: The World of Caffeine
3.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

42
. We can even surmise something about the date before which coffee could not have come into great prominence in Islam from the absence of any mention of coffee or coffeehouses by Antonio Menavino, who, in 1548, did not include coffee in a list of drinks drunk by the Turks. Nor did Pierre Belon mention the plant in 1558 in his list of Arabia’s plants.

43
. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour,
Traitez Nouveux
&
curieux Du Café, Du Thé et Du Chocolate,
p. 37.

44
. Hattox,
Coffee and Coffeehouses,
pp. 81–82, quoting Pedro Teixeira,
The Travels of Pedro Teixeira.

45
.
Ibid.,
p. 81, quoting Jean de Thévenot,
Suite de Voyage du Levant,
Amsterdam, 1727.

46
. Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 82, quoting George Sandys.

47
. Hattox,
Coffee and Coffeehouses,
p. 99, quoting Thévenot.

48
. Carston Niebuhr,
Travels through Arabia and other countries in the East,
vol. I, p. 126.

49
.
Ibid.,
p. 73.

50
. W.B. Seabrook,
Adventures in Arabia,
p. 72.

51
.
Ibid.,
pp. 34–35.

52
.
Ibid.,
p. 108.

53
.
Ibid.,
pp. 172–73.

54
. Alain Borer,
Rimbaud in Abyssinia,
p. 180.

55
.
Ibid.,
pp. 183–84.

56
.
Ibid.,
p. 186, quoting Arthur Rimbaud, letter to M. de Gaspary, Aden, November 9, 1887.

57
. Edward Bramah,
Tea & Coffee,
p. 106.

58
. Hattox,
Coffee and Coffeehouses,
p. 18.

59
. This symbolic use of wine and intoxication is brilliantly exemplified in the original Persian of the
Rubaiyyat
of Omar Khayaam. Although the poem was hypnotically, musically, and sensually rendered into English by Fitzgerald, this familiar version, steeped in
the celebration of sexual and alcoholic dissipation, is a reflection more of the hedonistic dream world of late Victorian repression in which the translator lived than it is of the spiritual life of the tenth-century Sufi author. For a version that purports to be truer to the original, see
The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam,
translated by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.

60
.
Encyclopoedia Britannica,
“Arabia” (Yemen: Arab Republic), vol. 10, p. 906.

61
.
Harper’s Weekly,
New York, January 21, 1911.

62
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
map, p. 79.

63
. Krapf,
Travels, Researches,
p. 46.

CHAPTER 2
tea

1
. Toussaint-Samat,
History of Food,
p. 605.

2
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Tea,
vol. I, p. 1.

3
. Kit Chow and Ione Kramer,
All the Tea in China,
p. 2.

4
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Tea,
vol. I, p. 3.

5
. Chow and Kramer,
All the Tea in China,
p. 3.

6
. According to legend, Bodhidharma carried meditation too far, and his legs atrophied from disuse and dropped off. For this reason, images of him are generally legless and are sometimes called “snowmen.”

7
. Lü Yu,
Classic of Tea,
p. 12.

8
. Adapted from Carpenter,
ibid.,
p. 15.

9
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
p. 149.

10
. Toussaint-Samat,
History of Food,
p. 596.

11
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
p. 149.

12
. Chow and Kramer,
All the Tea in China,
p. 3.

13
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
p. 149.

14
. Jennifer Anderson,
Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual,
p. 21.

15
. Lu Yü,
Classic of Tea,
p. 50.

16
. This reference appears in Chang Yu-hsin’s book,
A Record of Waters for Boiling Teas.

17
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
p. 150.

18
. Lu Yü,
Classic of Tea,
p. 72.

19
.
Ibid.,
pp. 105–7.

20
.
Ibid.,
pp. 107–9.

21
.
Ibid.,
p. 116.

22
. Kakuzo Okakura,
The Book of Tea,
p. 12.

23
. Lu Yü,
Classic of Tea,
p. 17.

24
. Rand Castile,
The Way of Tea,
p. 49.

25
.
Ibid.,
p. 30.

26
. Okakura,
The Book of Tea,
p. 11.

27
. Schapira et al.,
Book of Coffee and Tea,
p. 148.

28
. J. Anderson,
Japanese Tea Ritual,
p. 14.

29
. Lu Yü,
Classic of Tea,
notes to p. 61, pp. 158–59.

30
. J. Anderson,
Japanese Tea Ritual,
p. 17.

31
.
Ibid.,
p. 18.

32
. Castile,
The Way of Tea,
p. 49.

33
. J. Anderson,
Japanese Tea Ritual,
p. 21.

34
. Toussaint-Samat,
History of Food,
p. 597.

CHAPTER 3
cacao

1
. Marcia Morton and Frederic Morton,
Chocolate: An Illustrated History,
pp. 3–4.

2
. Sophie Coe and Michael Coe,
The True History of Chocolate,
p. 73.

3
. Morton and Morton,
Chocolate,
pp. 3–4.

4
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
p. 78.

5
.
Ibid.,
p. 97.

6
. Other explorers had the same experience. In
The Conquest of New Spain,
the seventeenth-century explorer Bernal Diaz describes how the Aztecs “brought him in cups of pure gold a drink made from the cocoa plant, which they said he took before visiting his wives.”

7
. Morton and Morton,
Chocolate,
p. 4.

8
. Nelson Foster and Linda Cordell, ed.,
Chilies to Chocolate,
p. 105.

9
.
Ibid.
Yet there is the Spanish painting of the gifts of the Magi, done about 1501, in which an American Indian is shown proffering a bowl of what looks like cacao.

10
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
pp. 37–39. See also “Maya Writing,” David Stuart and Stephen D.Houston,
Scientific American,
August 1989, pp. 82–89.

11
. Foster and Cordell,
Chilies to Chocolate,
pp. 105–8.

12
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
pp. 48–49. Also see David Stuart, “The Rio Azul Cacao Pot: Epigraphic Observations on the Function of a Maya Ceramic Vessel,”
Antiquity
62 (1988): 153–157.

13
. Which we assume were all
criollo.

14
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
p. 51.

15
.
Ibid.,
p. 87.

16
.
Ibid.,
p. 12, quoting Gage.

17
.
Ibid.,
pp. 11–12, quoting Gage.

CHAPTER 4
monks and men-at-arms

1
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
p. 107. The Coes point out that the money reference was an interpolation found in the Italian edition but not in the lost original. The Coes’ quotation is adapted from Samuel Morison,
Journals and Other Documents on the Life and
Voyages of Christopher Columbus,
New York: Heritage Press, 1963, p. 327.

2
. Barbara Grunes and Phyllis Magida,
Chocolate Classics,
p. 3.

3
. Benjamin Moseley,
A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effect of Coffee,
p. 40. We note that a different answer to a similar question about coffee’s permissibility during a time of fasting was reached in Turkey. According to Moseley, “The Turks who frequently subsist a considerable time upon Coffee only, look on it as an aliment that affords great nourishment to the body:—for which reason, during the rigid fast of the
Ramadam,
or Turkish Lent, it is not only forbid, but any person is deemed to have violated the injunctions of his Prophet, that has had even the smell of Coffee.”

4
. Grunes and Magida,
Chocolate Classics,
p. 3.

5
. Morton and Morton,
Chocolate,
p. 15.

6
. Coe and Coe,
True History,
p. 156.

7
. Henry Phillips,
The Companion for the Orchard,
p. 67.

8
.
OED,
“cacao,” quoting Blundevil,
Exerc. V. Ed. 7,
p. 568.

9
. Jill Norman,
Coffee,
pp. 10–11.

10
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 53.

11
. Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
Tastes of Paradise,
p. 92.

12
. Norman,
Coffee,
pp. 11–12.

13
.
Ibid.,
p. 14.

CHAPTER 5
the caffeine trade supplants the spice trade

1
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Tea,
vol. I, p. 24. This account is found in Samuel Purchas,
Purchas His Pilgrimes,
London, 1625.

2
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 31. Linschoten’s book may have been the source for a common European belief that tea tenderizes meat, which became prevalent over a century later.

3
. Nicol,
A Treatise on Coffee,
p. 121. Also see Jacob,
Epic of a Commodity,
p. 43

4
. Denys Forrest,
Tea for the British,
pp. 19–21.

5
. Vieussens, the first physician to perform chemical examination of the blood, the only Parisian follower of Sylvius, the great Dutch champion of Harvey and caffeine, also suffered condemnation by the Paris Faculty.

6
. Ukers,
All about Tea,
vol. I, p. 33.

7
.
Ibid.,
vol. II, p. 487.

8
.
Ibid.,
vol. I, p. 72.

9
. Jacob,
Epic of a Commodity,
p. 43.

10
. Jardin Edelestan,
Le Caféier et le Café,
p. 16.

11
. Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 87, who also mentions an admittedly unconfirmed account that, under the reign of Louis XIII, coffee was sold by a Levantine in the Petit Chatelet, as
cohove
or
cahoue.

12
. Disraeli explains, “It appears…that Thévenot, in 1658, gave coffee after dinner; but it was considered as the whim of a traveller; neither the thing itself, nor its appearance, was inviting: It was probably attributed by the gay to the humour of a vain, philosophical traveller. But ten years afterwards, a Turkish ambassador at Paris made the beverage highly fashionable. The elegance of the equipage recommended to the eye, and charmed the women: the brilliant porcelain cups in which it was poured; the napkins fringed with gold, and the Turkish slaves on their knees presenting it to the ladies, seated on the ground on cushions, turned the heads of the Parisian dames” (Isaac Disraeli,
Curiosities of Literature,
vol. II, p. 321).

13
. In 1692, Damame Francois, a Parisian merchant, became the man to see about caffeine after receiving a royal patent to sell coffee and tea in France, which was to be exclusive throughout the nation for ten years.

14
. He continues, “Members of good society in Paris did not then visit houses of public entertainment.” Jacobs,
Epic of a Commodity,
p.
83.

15
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Coffee,
p. 95.

16
. Quoted in Jacobs,
Epic of a Commodity,
p. 136.

17
. Alfred Franklin, “Le café, le the, et le chocolat,” in
Arts et métiers de Parisiens du XII au XVIII siecle,
Paris, 1893.

18
. In 1664, because of the astonishing arrival of four thousand French troops, when Louis XIV had sent in support of his fellow Christians despite his treaty with Mohammed IV, the Turks withdrew from Vienna’s walls. Although the Turks had suffered defeat in battle, the terms of their retreat, according to which they assumed control of Hungary, were extremely favorable. What Suleiman Aga learned in Paris served to deter any further reliance on the Sun King. In 1683, the Turkish Janissaries were joined at the walls of Vienna by no French troops, whose arrival, had it suited Louis’s whim to have sent them, would most certainly have reversed the defeat generally acknowledged to have marked the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Louis XIV continued his remarkable flipflopping, in 1684 signing a treaty with Leopold I of Austria and in 1688 sending troops against him just as he had done against the Turks.

19
. Heise,
Coffee and Coffee-Houses,
p. 16.

20
. Harold B. Segel,
The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits: 1890–1938,
pp. 8–9, citing Karl Teply,
Die Einfuhrung des Kaffees in Wien: Georg
Franz Kolschitzky, Johannes Diodato, Isaak de Luca
(Vienna, Kommissionsverlag Jugend und Volk Wien-Munchen, 1980).

21
. Heise,
Coffee and Coffee-Houses,
pp. 103–5

22
. Manfred Hamm,
Coffee Houses of Europe,
p. 9.

23
. Harry Rolnick,
The Complete Book of Coffee,
p. 142.

24
. Quoted in Ukers,
All about Tea,
vol. I, pp. 31–32.

25
. Casper David Friedrich,
Briefen und Bekenntnissen,
ed. Sigrid Hinz, Berlin, 1974, p. 35.

CHAPTER 6
the late adopters

Other books

Dimples Delight by Frieda Wishinsky
TRUTH by Sherri Hayes
Be on the Lookout by Tyler Anne Snell
Mr. 365 by Clampett, Ruth
The Man With No Face by John Yeoman
Howler's Night by Black, RS
Amandine by Marlena de Blasi
The Star Princess by Susan Grant