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1 1 Coffee’s Social Dimensions I n his novel The Coffee Trader, David Liss offers two exquisite vignettes that capture first contacts with coffee in early modern Amsterdam. The novel opens with its hero’s virgin encounter with coffee: “Firmer than water or wine, it rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting. Miguel Lienzo picked it up and pulled it so close he almost dipped his nose into the tarry liquid. Holding the vessel still for an instant, he breathed in, pulling the scent deep into his lungs. The sharp odor of earth and rank leaves surprised him, it was like something an apothecary might keep in a chipped porcelain jar.” Lienzo was spared the embarrassment of not knowing what to do with coffee, let alone how to prepare it—it was served to him fully prepared and ready to be consumed. Not so with Hannah, the heroine of Liss’s story, who stumbled across a sack of coffee beans in the cellar of her house where Lienzo, her brother-in-law, had stored them. “Hannah believed she knew what coffee was,” but that proved not exactly to be the case: She found a sack of curiously pungent berries the colour of dead leaves. She put one in her mouth. It was hard and bitter, but she chewed it anyway despite the vague ache in her teeth. Why, she wondered, would anyone care about so foul a substance? Still, she was intrigued. She opened the bag of coffee again and took another handful of the berries, letting them run through her fingers. Maybe she should eat more of them, develop a taste for their bitterness. When Miguel someday suggested that she eat coffee, she could laugh and say, “Oh, coffee, how delightful !” and toss a handful in her mouth as though she had been eating bitter fruit all her life—which, after all, she had. She carefully picked out another berry and crushed it with her back teeth. It would take some time before she could find it delightful. I open with these vignettes to remind us of the obvious: coffee was not always an integral part of our everyday lives. Indeed, the mode of its preparation and even of its consumption was not totally self-evident in its early years in Europe or even in the Middle East. Chocolate, tea, and coffee arrived in Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, symbolically illustrating the fruits of global exploration that took Europeans both west and east, bringing chocolate from the Americas, tea from the Far East, and coffee from the much closer Middle East. 2 jews welcome coffee All three offered new solutions to quenching thirst while also offering an exotic taste, combined at times with the sweetness of sugar, itself a new arrival. Chocolate arrived first, coming in the early s from Mesoamerica. Tea arrived from China later in the sixteenth century, brought by Portuguese and Dutch ships. The last arrival was coffee, first known to Europeans from the writings of sixteenth-century travelers, and arriving in the early seventeenth century at the ports of Venice, Marseille, London, and Amsterdam. The sequence of arrival in different countries was not uniform, however, and the three arrived almost simultaneously in England in the late s. The coffee plant apparently spread from Ethiopia to the mountainous and similar climate of southern Yemen in the late fourteenth century, probably during the course of fighting. The references to coffee during this period are mostly to its medicinal uses. The first reference to coffee as a drink comes from a fifteenth-century manuscript by a Sufi Mufti in Aden. It was only gradually that the term qahwa came to designate the beverage as we know it. At first, it was synonymous with the word bunn, meaning the bean of the coffee plant. It was also used to indicate a beverage made from the leaves of the coffee plant. Finally, by the later fifteenth century, qahwa came to mean the beverage made from the bean. Scholars continue to debate the origins of the Arabic word qahwa for coffee , but there has emerged a strong preference by most writers for the interpretation that emphasizes qahwa as a term used previously for wine. Ralph Hattox indicates that the root of qahwa denotes the sense of making something repugnant . Wine in this sense discourages eating, while coffee discourages sleep. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, prefacing its discussion of qahwa as “an Arabic word of uncertain...

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