Coffee: From Bean to Barista by Robert W. Thurston

Author:Robert W. Thurston [Thurston, Robert W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538108093
Google: XElmDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07FXMTN6B
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2018-10-07T23:00:00+00:00

Sultan Ahmet (Blue) Mosque, Istanbul, built 1609–1616. Every Western European traveler to Istanbul after 1616, and probably almost every traveler to the “East,” would have seen this imposing mosque on a hill in the center of the city. It is an extremely impressive sight to this day.

Photographed by Miran Iranian between 1870 and 1900. Library of Congress

According to the French traveler Jean de Thévenot, who visited Istanbul in the mid-seventeenth century, “all sorts of people” frequented the city’s coffeehouses. The customers were all male, and typically they might linger in a café and enjoy both the drink and the ever-present music.50

There is a debate about where the first Western coffeehouse appeared, in London or in Oxford. The evidence seems better for London’s claim. At some point between 1652 and 1654, a public coffee service opened in London. William Ukers, a noted historian and promoter of coffee in the period 1910–1940, reproduced “the first coffee advertisement, 1652,” from an original in the British Museum.51 This early enterprise, located in London, was sponsored by two merchants of the Levant Company, chartered in 1605. One of the businessmen, Daniel Edwards, already enjoyed a reputation as a “prodigious drinker” of coffee, consuming “two or three Dishes” of it several times a day. Edwards had earlier met a young Greek in Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey), Pascal Rosee (or Rosée), who now came to London to manage the new shop. Smyrna was already a lively center of international trade. The English were bringing home the sophistication that they found abroad and that Rauwolf and numerous others had described. Although Rosée’s first place of business was apparently a shack whose shutters opened wide for service, it was not long before he and another associate set up a more stable shop.52

Coffee received a huge push in France in 1669 with the arrival of the Turkish ambassador Suleiman Aga at the court of Versailles. A large and imposing man who dressed in colorful robes, he soon became a hit with elegant French women, to whom he served coffee in porcelain cups and saucers. Porcelain was still not produced in Europe, partly owing to the lack up to that time of kaolin clay, found on the continent only in the eighteenth century. Aga epitomized the exotic at a European court that prided itself on creating or discovering the latest fashions and tastes.

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