Food History

I have to give you a report on a drink-related book tonight. Tomorrow is Purim and that is one of the two Great Drink-related Festivals in Judaism.

Every year I meet people who tangle Judaism and Islam. Every year someone says to me “Jews don’t drink.” The only possible answer to that is impolite laughter.

On Purim we don’t drink: we overdrink. It’s a religious obligation. I’m not very good at fulfilling this obligation: I get some bottles out, friends come round, we pour ourselves drinks and we start talking and forget the drinks. But I try. Every single year I make the effort.

Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses has nothing to do with my failed efforts to get drunk. It’s a series of quick visits to various drinks at various places and times. There is ancient beer (Mesopotamia and Egypt), Classical wine (Greece and Rome - not classical whine, which is Cicero in misery-gut mode, or maybe it’s Martial), American colonial drink (proving there was drink history in the US before Prohibition), coffee, tea and Coca-Cola. Just from the chapter summary you can see that this is history as seen from American eyes. It’s not the history of the world; it’s the history of the US world.

My favourite chapter varies according to what I’ve been drinking. I’ve just had a cup of Fair Trade Timor Arabica, so I have to head straight for the stuff about coffee.

My personal take on coffee is that can show us some remarkable things about societal change from the seventeenth century and that it is a clear indicator of British expansion as the Empire grew. Remember, I’m Australian, so the British Empire growing is not nearly as evil a thing as it is to denizens of other countries. We’re one of the few Commonwealth countries who were persuaded into self-rule against our wishes, so we’ve never developed that well of hate and sad memories. All of which is surprisingly relevant to the history of coffee: you can trace the nineteenth century through its coffee plantations, to an extent. I’ve always suspected that the British trade was responsible for the arabica bean being displaced by the new, big, caffeine-filled and less tasty robusta. One day I’ll have to find out if I’m right.

Where the history of coffee begins for Standage is coffee houses and political chat. He mentions the myths of coffee discovery (my favourite is the Ethiopian goatherd who deduced coffee from the behaviour of his animals).

He doesn’t worry too much about the gap in time before the early evidence of knowledge of the bean and the fifteenth century. As I read it (the evidence, not the book) we have very clear evidence for coffee drinking being established by then, but it’s quite likely it was drunk earlier. There’s a little evidence for around the twelfth century (going from memory here - never trust my memory) but not enough to say anything firm. I have to dispute Standage’s statement (p.137) that the real innovation of drinking coffee was in the fifteenth century. Right now, though, the jury is out - there’s just not enough evidence for firm statements. And I, personally, will hold out for an earlier date as long as I can.

Standage talks about the debate in Mecca on whether coffee was an intoxicant and quickly moves to coffee’s spread to Europe and straight into London coffeehouses. Standage is more interested in the social and religious side of things than the development of trade routes and rise and fall of nations. He simplifies things (were all coffeehouses really well-lit and well-furnished as he claims? they multiplied so very rapidly that they may well have been mixed in standard) but he gives a good overview of the social history of the drink, including the rather ill-judged 1675 suppression of the multitudinous and subversive coffeehouses (I’m rather pleased I got ‘multitudinous’ and ’subversive’ into the one sentence.).

After this he moves to my favourite zone and discusses how empires were built on coffee. He talks about the Arabic (as opposed to the arabica - the people, not the beans) monopoly being broken by the Dutch, for instance. The Dutch trade is where we get kopi jawa style, and also beans such as Sumatra Mandheling and the Timorese one I was just drinking, in case you were wondering. After the Dutch came the French and the French West Indies. I need to find out some of their bean types and taste them - Standage doesn’t give bean types or tasting notes for almost any aspect, so it’s hard to know what qualities different countries looked for when they established plantations and set up trade networks.

He discusses in a fair amount of detail how one plant became the ancestor for the coffees of Haiti and Cuba and Costa Rica and Venezuela (is it the same bean now sold as Costa Rica Tarrazu? I need to find out) but he stops there. This is a pity. Coffee trading didn’t stop there. Sri Lanka was a major coffee provider before it gave us some of the world’s best tea (and the story of how it moved from coffee to tea is amazing and tragic), and the British Empire took coffee to Kenya and to North America and many other places.

I really like this book. It has good potted overviews and the writing style is very friendly. There are occasional bad puns, which of course I like. How could I not like puns? I think I need a bigger glass for each of the six drinks he provides, though - it’s left me feeling a little thirsty.