The Cordial Cup of Coffee

Playboy's food & drink editor

For six hundred years, professional bamboozlers have been warning people about the evil effects of coffee. Centuries ago men were told it would make them sterile. Women were cautioned to avoid the wicked shot of caffein unless they wanted to be barren. But above all, the dark brown brew would fill one's nights with shivery shakes and forever ruin one's sleep.

It's high time to recognize that what counts is not what coffee does to your sleep but what sleep does to your coffee.

Any bus boy bringing a banker his morning scuttle of coffee can tell how the old financier slept by his reaction to it. The brew will be the same mixture of Bogota and Java the customer has drunk for twenty years. The raw coffee beans have been roasted the same way for two decades, ground as always, brewed in the same urn by the same pantryman. And yet if the banker suffered an unexpected loss the day before on some gilt-edged debentures that suddenly turned sour, and if he spent a night in sorry befuddlement, his customary morning coffee will necessarily taste like a cup of pure mud.

Observe the type of gadabout who spends sixty-four dollars for a pair of tickets to the latest musical on Broadway and who then takes his companion on a champagne bender from the El Morocco to the Stork Club to the Versailles. He continues to fête her only to discover when he reaches her apartment that the girl whom he hoped would be such a sweet side dish turns out to be a cold storage chicken who won't even let him unbutton his vest. Watch that guy drinking coffee the next morning. He'll bark at the waiter like blood and thunder. His coffee will taste like the murk of soapy water run through three clothes washings.

Then take the all-too-common example of the bon vivant who swills down eight Martinis before eating a midnight supper of anchovy canapes, fried clams, French fried potatoes, tartar sauce and mince pie a la mode. During the supper he drinks five bottles of ale. After supper he absorbs eight brandies, six highballs and eleven assorted liqueurs. He starts to drink his twelfth liqueur when he is pronounced unconscious. The taxi driver hauls him into his room where he is put in a horizontal position and sleeps the sleep of the damned. Hours later when he awakens, he shouts for black coffee. It may be good black coffee, but with the first sip of it he twists his neck violently like a man trying to escape from the hangman's noose. He tries another gulp and then demands to know why they are giving him embalming fluid instead of the coffee he ordered.

The opposite situation is just as common. Watch the behavior of the young man who is only out of Harvard three years and who wakes up one fine morning to find his picture in the financial section of the New York Times. Could he possibly complain of the friendly brew as it goes smoothly down his happy throat?

Or, how about the young fellow who becomes engaged and finally marries the girl not knowing whether the lass to whom he has pledged his troth will turn out to be a happy playmate or just a legalized yoke. On his honeymoon he discovers that she is actually a woman of infinite resources, imagination and humor. He will sleep like a chestnut, and wake up, bounding into the dining room, to drink the draught of the happy gods, a cup of good coffee with sweet cream and sugar.

These phenomena have, of course, been recognized in the restaurant industry for years. Any captain in a large hotel or club dining room will confirm the fact that the favorite time for complaints about coffee is at the cold gray dawn of breakfast rather than at lunch or dinner. Every waiter knows that at 7:00 A. M. the taste buds are still semiconscious and that while patrons will occasionally grumble about the boiled eggs, the toast or the oatmeal, by far the greatest amount of grousing is saved for the coffee.

Conversely, any experienced waiter will be able to spot the fellow who has awakened still obviously remembering an incredibly smooth skin and full lips unable to separate from his own. The servant will recognize the gentleman's refreshing mood as the kind that inspired Milton to write about coffee in Comus,

". . . one sip of this

Will bathe the drooping spirits

in delight

Beyond the bliss of dreams."

Some people, like University of Chicago's Professor Nathaniel Kleitman, will try to tell you that coffee's notorious stay-awake qualities are all in the mind. Kleitman divided some volunteer students into two test groups, poured coffee into one group and milk into another, and watched how they slept. The coffee drinkers slept badly; the milk drinkers snoozed like logs. The only hitch was that the wily Prof had secretly spiked the milk with more caffein than coffee contains. Playboy timidly suggests that it may depend upon the individual nervous system.

The very fact that coffee can keep some people awake is what makes it such a magnificent drink. What is proclaimed as its fault turns out to be its virtue. Anyone from the pilot in his cockpit to the author at his desk will agree that while the night may have been intended for sleeping, the daytime was planned for wakefulness.

The very first coffee ever brewed was discovered by an Arabian abbot in charge of a group of sleepy monks who couldn't keep awake during the evening religious rites. A goatherd from the hills had brought to the abbot's attention some wild berries which his goats had eaten and which caused them to be unusually playful. The berries were the green seeds of the plant which we now know as Coffea Arabica.

The abbot was a venturesome fellow. He boiled the strange beans in water and concocted a novel and extremely pleasing beverage. The monks who were served the festive drink were not only wowed off their wooden seats but stayed awake and prayed happily ever after.

Both the goats and the monks discovered that coffee was not only a stimulant but a form of pleasure, like a girl, a good joke or a gay bottle of wine. The blue noses therefore got busy and condemned, denounced and prohibited it.

As coffee drinking spread from Arabia to Turkey to Venice to France and finally to the New World, it enjoyed a checkered career, being alternately welcomed as man's most hospitable drink and damned because it was liquid joy, and therefore, a moral danger. In Turkey, for instance, during the Sixteenth Century, coffee houses were opened on every street corner. A Turkish woman, according to the law of the day, could divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee. But the authorities discovered that the male Turk not only drank coffee in his coffee house but also played the tambourine and generally had a good time. And authorities are notorious foes of The Good Time.

Coffee houses and coffee making in Turkey were prohibited, only to give rise to a swarm of coffee speakeasies where the outlawed brew again flowed in large volume. Like a later Prohibition in a more advanced state, the Turkish edict eventually had to be rescinded. Coffee houses returned by the thousands and travellers to Turkey told how the Turks, now on a grand national coffee jag, spent more money on their coffee than Parisians spent on their wine. The average Turk drank twenty cups of coffee a day. If he was the sort of citizen who suffered from insomnia, he would drink a cup of coffee before bedtime and then smoke strong tobacco until he became drowsy and fell asleep.

Coffee historians describe how a similar battle took place in Sweden between those who loved coffee and those who thought it was an evil and a threat to health. King Gustav III settled the fracas in truly objective scientific fashion. Identical twins had been sentenced to death for murder. Gustav ordered their sentences commuted to life imprisonment if the men would agree to a scientific test. One was to be given large doses of coffee and the other large doses of tea. The twins and the Swedes waited and waited. Finally at the tender age of 83 the tea drinker died. The Swedes now enjoy one of the highest per capita consumptions of coffee in the world.

Frederick the Great of Prussia tried to eliminate coffee drinking because of the large amount of money that went to foreign exporters. "My people must drink beer," Frederick stormed in one of his manifestos. "His Majesty was brought up on beer and so were his ancestors and his officers." But the people kept on drinking the tasty product of the little brown berry. Frederick tried to change their habits by making it fashionable to drink coffee from expensive chinaware. One of his recipes or coffee included not only coffee and water but also champagne and mustard. Finally in 1781 he gave up the fight but made the coffee business a royal monopoly from which he collected enormous tribute.

Among those who disagreed vehemently with Frederick and the anti-coffee crowd was a musician who had been invited to Frederick's court, Johann Sebastian Bach. The great composer was so riled by the stories claiming that coffee would make one sterile that he wrote his Coffee Cantata published in Leipzig in 1732. In this composition Bach tells the story of a slovenly father who threatens to break off his daughter's marriage unless the girl gives up her habit of coffee drinking. The girl agrees to renounce coffee only to change her mind at the last minute when her mother and grandmother reveal that they have always been inveterate coffee drinkers and who can, therefore, blame the daughter?

Johann Sebastian Bach was the father of twenty children.

One can almost imagine how the French people, the most civilized sensualists in the world, would react to coffee. The greatest French satirist, Voltaire, limited himself to seventy cups a day. When Maria Theresa married into the French royal family in the Seventeenth Century, she counted the coffee beans as part of her dowry. Among the earliest of the chain coffee drinkers were two famous mistresses of Louis XV. Portraits in oil of Louis' playmates, Madame de Pompadour and Madame Du Barry, show both of these girls drinking java from demi-tasse cups.

Coffee lovers have long since ceased to think about good and evil in the magic brown bean. They do know, however, that their daily drink is an excitant that revives their tired muscles, warms their hearts and livens their brains.

Knowing playboys have discovered that a good cup of coffee doesn't necessarily depend on the price but much more on freshness. Professional coffee tasters, for instance, ask when coffee was roasted, when it was ground and when it was brewed. For after each of these steps the volatile magic which is the coffee flavor slowly disappears into the air.

Years ago fresh coffee was delivered to restaurants and hotels each day just like bread or milk. When the coffee boy brought his bags of coffee into the storeroom, the chef ran to feel the bags to make sure they were still warm to the touch, indicating that the coffee was roasted only a half-hour or an hour earlier. The coffee was rushed to the waiting pantryman who opened the bags and smelled the heavenly fragrance for which no words were adequate.

When you open a pound of vacuum packed coffee these days, it has the same original freshness the moment you take off the lid. But after you've used it once or twice, and the pound of coffee has been exposed to the air, oxidation does its dirty work. If you could use the whole pound of coffee at one time, you'd enjoy all the original coffee goodness. For most bachelors this is obviously impractical.

The average fellow keeping his own apartment doesn't want to burden his kitchen drawer with utensils such as rotary egg beaters, needles for sewing poultry, basting syringes and other furnishings. But if he invested a few dollars in a small hand coffee grinder, and if he bought his coffee beans whole, and if he ground the coffee while his playmate waited in the living room, he would always be able to produce the kind of magnificent night cap that both soothes and stimulates at the same time.

Any child can brew coffee, and Playboy is not offering a primer on how to do it. But there are certain things to remember and certain things to avoid.

As far as coffee-makers are concerned, Playboy finds that the glass utensils (concluded on page 46) Coffee (continued from page 18) are best. Aluminum and stainless steel are all right if they are kept scrupulously clean by burnishing, but the metals are frequently the source of unpleasant flavor, while glass tends to have little interaction with coffee.

It is extremely important to rinse out the coffee-maker with scalding hot water just before making coffee. If you smell the dripolator or percolator that has been used repeatedly, even though the utensil has been cleaned regularly, you will often detect a stale coffee odor. Fill it half full with boiling water or very hot water from the faucet. Swish the water around to eliminate this off odor before making coffee. After each use the coffee pot should be washed well with warm soapy water. Use a stiff brush or scouring pad. After repeated uses, say every two or three weeks, the coffee pot should be cleaned with baking soda water. Fill the pot with water. Add one teaspoon baking soda for each quart of water, and boil for five minutes. Rinse out well before making coffee.

The old-fashioned coffee pot is seldom used these days because it produces a thick cloudy liquid that most people dislike. The percolator is an easy apparatus to handle, but you can not always regulate the brewing time accurately, and the coffee will not be of consistent strength at all times. There is an automatically controlled electric percolator which regulates the brewing time and keeps the coffee warm until served.

The dripolator is especially recommended for its simplicity. One type of dripolator uses filter papers rather than the mesh wire basket and produces a particularly clear strong coffee.

The vacuum pots with top and bottom sections can produce a delicious brew, but they are sometimes troublesome because the top section may not separate from the bottom. An electric vacuum coffee-maker does not cause this trouble readily and is especially good for keeping the coffee hot until served.

For any coffee-maker, however, it is important to use the proper grind of coffee. One of the expensive vacuum packed coffees now on the market is designed for all types of coffee. All other coffee brands indicate percolator, dripolator or vacuum type. If you grind your own coffee, you can regulate the grinder for the type of coffee you need for your own coffee-maker.

It is extremely vital to use enough coffee so that the brew is really deep dark brown and not an insipid straw-colored fluid. For the average taste, allow two level measuring tablespoons per cup. There are special measuring spoons which are a perfect guide. In many percolators and dripolators, measurements are indicated for the amount of coffee necessary. When in doubt, use more coffee rather than less.

For the man who loves coffee enough to experiment with some of the variations on the classical coffee theme, Playboy offers the following beverages:

[recipe_title]Turkish Coffee[/recipe_title]

This is the thick frothy brew served in Turkish cups which are somewhat smaller than demi-tasse cups. The drink is a combination dessert and beverage to be consumed like a fine liqueur.

For four cups put three tablespoons of very finely pulverized coffee into a Turkish coffee maker (a long uncovered pot, tapering toward the top, without a lid.) Add four teaspoons powdered sugar. Add four cups of water using the Turkish cups as the measuring unit. Bring to a boil. Remove the pot from the flame. Tap the side of the pot to settle the coffee. Again bring to a boil, remove from the flame and tap sides. Repeat the process a third time and then serve the coffee at once, pouring the coffee so that the froth is equally divided between the four cups.

[recipe_title]Caffe Espresso[/recipe_title]

Visitors to Italy will know this delightful after-dinner coffee. It is rich dark brew served with lemon peel, brandy or anise. In large restaurants it is sometimes made in special urns which steam rather than boil the coffee grinds. In your apartment you can use an espresso coffee-maker which is really a dripolator so constructed that you merely turn the pot upside down when the water boils, and the boiling water flows over the coffee grinds.

Buy the French or Italian roasted coffee. This is coffee roasted until the color is shiny black rather than the normal deep brown. Into the basket of the coffee maker place four level measuring tablespoons of the finely ground coffee. Pour two cups of boiling water over the coffee. As soon as some of the coffee has poured through, set the pot over the smallest possible flame to keep hot. In each cup put a piece of twisted lemon peel, 1/2 jigger cognac or 1/2 jigger anise liqueur. Pour the coffee into four demi-tasse cups. Sweeten to taste.

[recipe_title]Cafe Au Lait[/recipe_title]

The French version of coffee with milk is made as follows. Allow three tablespoons of coffee per cup instead of the usual two. While the coffee is being made, heat milk up to the scalding point, that is, until the bubbles appear around the edge of the pot. Pour coffee and milk from separate pots into the coffee cups, using approximately half coffee and half milk.

[recipe_title]Cafe Brulot[/recipe_title]

This is the glamorous show-off coffee prepared in a chafing dish. A special coffee-maker designed for the brew is called the Brulot dish but it is rarely used for this exotic form of spiced coffee laced with cognac.

In the heated chafing dish put four lumps of sugar, four whole cloves, two pieces of twisted lemon peel, two pieces of twisted orange peel (the peel about two inches long) two sticks of cinnamon bark about one inch long and two jiggers of cognac. Let the cognac heat until it is quite warm. Stir gently. Hold a match to the cognac until it turns into a little lake of blue flames. Let it burn for thirty seconds. Add four demi-tasse cups of fresh strong black coffee. Stir well. Ladle cafe brulot into demi-tasse cups.