All About Coffee Part 117

BETTY: Oh--yes? Father, a husband?

SLOWPOKE: I swear you can't have him--

BETTY: Till I give up coffee? Oh well--coffee--let it be forgotten--dear father--I will not drink--none!

SLOWPOKE: _Then_ you can have one!

BETTY (_Aria_): Today, dear father--do it _today_. (_He goes out._) Ah, a husband! Really this suits me exactly! When they know I must have coffee, why, before I go to bed to-night I can have a valiant lover! (_Goes out._)

TENOR (_Recitative_): Now go hunt up old Slowpoke, and just watch him get a husband for his daughter--for Betty is secretly making it known "that no wooer may come to the house, unless he promises me himself, and has it put in the marriage contract that he will allow me to make coffee whenever I will!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "AH, HOW SWEET COFFEE TASTES--LOVELIER THAN A THOUSAND KISSES, SWEETER FAR THAN MUSCATEL WINE!"

Opening bars of Betty's aria in Bach's _Coffee Cantata_, 1732]

(_Enter_ SLOWPOKE _and_ BETTY, _singing--as chorus--with_ TENOR.)

TRIO: The cat will not give up the mouse, old maids continue "coffee-sisters!"--the mother loves her drink of coffee--grandma, too, is a coffee fiend--_who_ now will blame the daughter!

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COFFEE HOUSE IN THE WORLD

The Caffe Pedrocchi in Padua, Italy, empire period, erected by the poor lemonade vendor and coffee seller, Antonio Pedrocchi.]

Research has discovered only one piece of sculpture a.s.sociated with coffee--the statue of the Austrian hero Kolschitzky, the patron saint of the Vienna coffee houses. It graces the second-floor corner of a house in the Favoriten Stra.s.se, where it was erected in his honor by the Coffee Makers' Guild of Vienna. The great "brother-heart" is shown in the att.i.tude of pouring coffee into cups on a tray from an oriental service pot.

The celebrated Caffe Pedrocchi, the center of life in the city of Padua, Italy, in the early part of the nineteenth century, is one of the most beautiful buildings erected in Italy. Its use is apparent at first glance. It was begun in 1816, opened June 9, 1831, and completed in 1842. Antonio Pedrocchi (1776-1852), an obscure Paduan coffee-house keeper, tormented by a desire for glory, conceived the idea of building the most beautiful coffee house in the world, and carried it out.

Artists and craftsmen of all ages since the discovery of coffee have brought their genius into play to fashion various forms of apparatus a.s.sociated with the preparation of the coffee drink. Coffee roasters and grinders have been made of bra.s.s, silver, and gold; coffee mortars, of bronze; and coffee making and serving pots, of beautiful copper, pewter, pottery, porcelain, and silver designs.

In the Peter collection in the United States National Museum there is to be seen a fine specimen of the Bagdad coffee pot made of beaten copper and used for making and serving; also, a beautiful Turkish coffee set.

In the Metropolitan Museum in New York there are some beautiful specimens of Persian and Egyptian ewers in faience, probably used for coffee service. Also, in American and continental museums are to be seen many examples of seventeenth-century German, Dutch, and English bronze mortars and pestles used for "braying" coffee beans to make coffee powder.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COFFEE GRINDER SET WITH JEWELS

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]

A very beautiful specimen of the oriental coffee grinder, made of bra.s.s and teakwood, set with red and green gla.s.s jewels, and inlaid in the teakwood with ivory and bra.s.s, is at the Metropolitan. This is of Indo-Persian design of the nineteenth century.

The Metropolitan Museum shows also many specimens of pewter coffee pots used in India, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Russia, and England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

One can guess at the luxuriousness of the coffee pots in use in France throughout the eighteenth century by noting that from March 20, 1754, to April 16, 1755, Louis XV bought no fewer than three gold coffee pots of Lazare Duvaux. They had carved branches, and were supplied with "chafing dishes of burnished steel" and lamps for spirits of wine. They cost, respectively, 1,950, 1,536, and 2,400 francs. In the "inventory of Marie-Josephe de Saxe, Dauphine of France", we note, too, a "two cup coffee pot of gold with its chafing dish for spirits of wine in a leather case."

The Italian wrought-iron coffee roaster of the seventeenth century was often a work of art. The specimen ill.u.s.trated is rich in decorative motifs a.s.sociated with the best in Florentine art.

Madame de Pompadour's inventory disclosed a "gold coffee mill, carved in colored gold to represent the branches of a coffee tree." The art of gold, which sought to embellish everything, did not disdain these homely utensils; and one may see at the Cluny Museum in Paris, among many mills of graceful form, a coffee mill of engraved iron dating from the eighteenth century, upon which are represented the four seasons. We are told, however, that it graced the "sale after the death of Mme. de Pompadour", which, of course, makes it much more valuable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ITALIAN WROUGHT-IRON COFFEE ROASTER

Courtesy of _Edison Monthly_]

"The tea pot, coffee pot and chocolate pot first used in England closely resembled each other in form", says Charles James Jackson in his _Ill.u.s.trated History of English Plate_, "each being circular in plan, tapering towards the top, and having its handle fixed at a right angle with the spout."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Tea Pot, 1670

Coffee Pot, 1681

Coffee Pot, 1689

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TEA POTS AND COFFEE POTS]

He says further:

The earliest examples were of oriental ware and the form of these was adopted by the English plate workers as a model for others of silver. It apparently was not until after both tea and coffee had been used for several years in this country [England] that the tea pot was made proportionately less in height and greater in diameter than the coffee pot. This distinction, which was probably due to copying the forms of Chinese porcelain tea pots, was afterwards maintained, and to the present day the difference between the tea pot and the coffee pot continued to be mainly one of height.

The coffee pot ill.u.s.trated (1681) formerly belonged to the East India Company, and is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is almost identical with a tea pot (1670) in the same museum, except that its straight spout is fixed nearer to the base, as is its leather-covered handle, which, with the sockets into which it fits, forms a long recurving scroll fixed opposite to and in line with the spout. Its cover, which is hinged to the upper handle socket, is high like that of the 1670 tea-pot; but instead of the straight outline of that cover, this is slightly waved and surmounted by a somewhat flat b.u.t.ton-shaped k.n.o.b. Engraved on the body is a shield of arms, a chevron between three crosses fleury, surrounded by tied feathers. The inscription is, "The Guift of Richard Sterne Eq to ye Honorable East India Compa."

This pot is nine and three-quarters inches in height by four and seven-eighths inches in diameter at the base; it bears the London hall-marks of 1681-82 and the maker's mark "G.G." in a shaped shield, thought by Jackson to be George Garthorne's mark.

The 1689 coffee pot ill.u.s.trated is the property of King George V. It bears the London hall-marks of 1689-90, and the mark of Francis Garthorne. Its tall, round body tapers toward the top, and has applied moldings on the base and rim. Its spout is straight and tapers upward to the level of the rim of the pot. Its handle is of ebony, crescent-shaped, and riveted into two sockets fixed at a right angle with the spout. The lid is a high cone surmounted by a small vase-shaped finial, and is hinged to the upper socket of the handle. On no part of the pot is there any ornamentation other than the royal cipher of King William III and Queen Mary, which is engraved on the reverse side of the body. This example, which measures nine inches in height to the top of its cover, resembles very closely in form the East India Company's tea-pot just referred to; but as teapots with much lower bodies appear to have come into fashion before 1689, this pot was probably used as a coffee pot from the first.

The 1692 coffee pot of lantern shape is the property of H.D. Ellis, and has its spout curved upward at the top, being furnished with a small, hinged flap and a scroll-shaped thumb-piece attached to the rim of the cover. The body and cover were originally quite plain, the embossing and chasing with symmetrical rococo decoration being added later, probably about 1740. Jackson says the wooden handle is not the original one, which was probably C-shaped. The pot bears the usual London hall-marks for the year 1692 and the maker's mark is "G G" upon a shaped shield, a mark recorded upon the copper plate belonging to the Goldsmiths'

company, which Mr. Cripps thinks was that of George Garthorne. The characteristics of this lantern shaped coffee pot are:

1. The straight sides, so rapidly tapering from the base upward that in a height of only six inches the base diameter of four and three-eighths inches tapers to a diameter of no more than two and one-half inches at the rim.

2. The nearly straight spout, furnished with a flap or shutter.

3. The true cone of the lid.

4. The thumb-piece, which is a familiar feature upon the tankards of the period.

5. The handle fixed at right angles to the spout.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LANTERN COFFEE POT, 1692]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOLKINGHAM POT, 1715-16]

Mr. Ellis, in a paper before the Society of Antiquaries[361] on the earliest form of coffee pot, says:

If coffee was first introduced into this country by the Turkey merchants, nothing is more probable than that those who first brought the berry, brought also the vessel in which it was to be served. Such a vessel would be the Turkish ewer whose shape is familiar to us, the same today as two hundred years ago, for in the East things are slow to change. And throughout the reign of the second Charles, so long as the extended use of coffee in the houses of the people was r.e.t.a.r.ded by the opposition of the Women of England, and by the scarcely less powerful influence of the King's Court, the small requirements of a mere handful of coffee-houses would be easily met by the importation of Turkish vessels.

Reference to the coffee-house keepers' tokens in the Beaufoy collection in the Guildhall Museum shows that many of the traders of 1660-1675 adopted as their trade sign a hand pouring coffee from a pot. This pot is invariably of the Turkish ewer pattern. It is true that there is nothing to show that the Turks themselves ever served coffee from the ewer, but it is scarcely conceivable that the English coffee-house keepers should have adopted as their trade sign, their pictorial advertis.e.m.e.nt, so to speak, a vessel which had no connection with the commodity in which they dealt, and which would convey no meaning a.s.sociated with coffee to the public. But as soon as the extended use of the beverage created a demand which stimulated a home manufacture of coffee-pots, a new departure is apparent. The undulating outlines beloved by the Orientals, bowed as their scimitars, curvilinear as their graceful flowing script, do not commend themselves to the more severe Western taste of the period which had then declared its preference for sweet simplicity in silversmiths' work, such as we see in the basons, cups, and especially the flat-topped tankards of that day. The beauty of the straight line had a.s.serted its power, and fashion felt its sway.

Such was the feeling that produced the coffee-pot of 1692, the straight lines of which continued in vogue until the middle of the following century, when a reaction in favour of bulbous bodies and serpentine spouts set in.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WASTELL POT, 1720-21]

Some of the more notable of the coffee-house-keepers' tokens in the Guildhall Museum were photographed for this work. They are described and ill.u.s.trated in chapter X.

There are ill.u.s.trated other silver coffee pots in the Victoria and Albert Museum, by Folkingham (1715-16), and by Wastell (1720-21), the latter pot being octagonal.