Coffee

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A Coffee tree is an evergreen tree that can grow up to 30 feet (9 metres), but it is kept shorter by pruning it into bushes to make it easier to pick the beans.

The bushes produce white blossoms that only last a few days, and then berries like very small, red cherries. Each berry has two seeds in it. The seeds are flat on one side, round on the other, with a line dividing them in half.

The outer pulp is removed by machine. Some Africans use the pulp to make wine from. A thin skin covering the seeds has then to be removed before roasting.

The longer the Coffee beans are roasted, the darker they will be and the stronger they will taste. Coffee beans usually come in light, medium and dark roast. That being said, such generic terms are usually replaced by marketing terms, so that you will see instead a particular roast of Coffee beans being called "Vienna Roast" or "Full City Roast."




Equivalents
1 pound (450g) ground Coffee = 80 tablespoons

Storage
Freeze left over Coffee in ice cube trays, then when frozen pop into freezer bags. Thaw a few cubes whenever you need a small amount of Coffee to flavour sauces, icings, cakes, etc.

History
Coffee is probably native to Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. It was known there around 700 AD. There is no hard evidence, though, as to how or when Coffee was first discovered as a drink.

By the 800s, the Arabs were boiling the beans to make a drink they called "qahwa". It was popular right away with the Muslims, as they were forbidden to have alcohol. Though it wasn't quite an exact substitute -- while wine can make you sleep, the Arabs knew about the properties of Coffee. Their word for it, "qahwa", meant "keeps you awake". The roasting of the beans probably didn't start until somewhere between 1000 and 1200 AD. Muslims took Coffee and Coffee plants everywhere they went. To control the trade, they made sure that all beans had been roasted first. By the 1500s, Coffee was a standard drink through the Arabic world.

About 1473 Coffee reached Constantinople and two years later, in 1475, the first Coffee house in Constantinople called "Kiv Han" opened.

The first commercial shipment of beans to arrive in Europe was in Venice in 1615.

In May 1637, John Evelyn noted that at Balliol College, Oxford, a student from Crete, Nathaniel Conopios, prepared and served Coffee to guests.

In 1650 or 1651, the first Coffee shop in England opened in Oxford. It was called "The Angel". The same entrepreneur, who was originally from Lebanon or Turkey, then opened the first Coffee shop in London in 1652. The first cafe in Paris opened in 1672 or 1686; the first cafe in Venice opened in 1683.

In 1690, the Dutch broke the Arab monopoly by smuggling a live Coffee plant from the Arab world and planting it in Java.

The Espresso machine was invented in 1822 by Louis Bernard Rabaut.

By 1858, 60 million pounds (27,215,542 kg) in weight of Coffee were being imported into the UK each year.

Decaffeinated Coffee was invented by a German man named Ludwig Roselius in 1903. Sanka came on the market in the US in 1923 (Sanka is derived from the French "sans caffeine").

Instant Coffee was invented by an Englishman named George Constant Washington, and put on the market as "Red E Coffee" in 1909. In the 1920s, companies begin promoting pre-roasted, pre-ground Coffee for its convenience to housewives. In 1938, Nestlé invented freeze-dried Coffee, and introduced it in Switzerland.

The British people's tea consumption went down during the rationing of the Second World War, and when rations were lifted in 1952, they didn't go back to tea in great numbers -- they switched instead to the American preference for Coffee.

Literature & Lore
Italians consider it the height of bad taste to drink a cappuccino after 11 in the morning. You will get away with it in North America and in the UK, where we don't know any better, but you if go to Italy, consider yourself forewarned if you want to avoid scandalized looks from barmen and other people.


"Coffee reheated gives an evil cooking liquid that might have been brewed out of the Dead Sea after a recipe left by the Witch of Endor." -- Clementine Paddleford (American food writer. 27 September 1898 - 13 November 1967)

Language Notes
Our word Coffee is derived either from Kaffa, a province in South-Western Ethiopia where the plant may have originated, or from the Arabic word "qahwa", meaning "keeps you awake".

Also called:
Coffea arabica (LINN.) (Scientific Name); Café (French); Kaffee (German); Caffè (Italian); Café (Spanish); Café (Portuguese)

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