Coffee-Making

"At that moment Zita came in with coffee. She made better coffee than anyone in the house; far better than Mr Challis, who went to the most terrific pother with special earthenware saucepans from Paris and a very difficult sort of chicory that no-one else had ever heard of, and exact calculations as to when to add the coffee to the water, and goodness knows what, and then produced a correct but unexciting beverage hardly worthy of all the fuss. Zita boiled water in a little black saucepan, then threw in handfuls of coffee, saying carelessly, 'It is easy – you chust make it strong enough', and out came a blazing-hot, fragrant black liquid worthy of Brillat-Savarin at his best. This annoyed Mr Challis . . ."

Stella Gibbons, Westwood (1946)

This sounds rather familiar to me, and I have to admit that I am a Zita, not a Mr Challis, when it comes to making coffee (and to cooking in general). By this I mean that I fling in coffee according to my mood rather than measuring exactly, with the exciting result that the coffee is always different. Frankly I think that measuring exactly is unlikely to yield a consistent result in any case, since the age and strength of the coffee and how long it has been open are also likely to affect the final flavour.

One of the things I find interesting about this passage is the coffee apparatus. Nowadays most people in the UK and Europe would agree that the preferred way to make coffee is in an espresso machine, which forces hot pressurized water through the roasted coffee, and thus is highly concentrated. Alan Davidson refers to this as 'the world-conquering Italian espresso machine', and for it we do indeed have to thank the Italians. But this is a relatively recent development. In 1946 - and for most of its history in Britain - coffee in the UK was made in a way more traditional to Arab countries, as well as Turkey and Greece: by grinding finely and then boiling. The cafetière, though it retains the oils in the beans in a way drip coffee does not, was only invented in 1929 (also by an Italian, despite the US name 'French press') and was not a common sight on British tables. Coffee was sipped from cups only a little smaller than teacups, not downed in shots from tiny cups, or served in large mugs filled from drip coffee machines, as it often is today in the USA.