A less favorable prognostication, however, attends the deliberate spilling of coffee. Among the Druse, Bedouin warriors of the Djebel, Seabrook took coffee with Ali bey, the ranking patriarch, in the company of his four sons and ten solemn Druse elders. Sitting cross-legged before the charcoal fire, Ali bey honored his guests by making the coffee himself and serving it in two small cups which were passed around and around the circle, telling a tale how an overturned coffee cup could amount to a sentence of death:
If a Druse ever shows cowardice in battle, he is not reproached, but the next time the warriors sit in a circle and coffee is served, the host stands before him, pours exactly as for the others, but in handing him the cup, deliberately spills the coffee on the coward’s robe. This is equivalent to a death sentence. In the next battle the man is forced not only to fight bravely but to offer himself to the bullets or swords of the enemy. No matter with how much courage he fights, he must not come out alive. If he fails, his whole family is disgraced.53
Evolving from the Sludge: African and Arabian Preparations of Coffee
Even though, as we noted at the outset of our discussion, no one has any direct evidence that the Nubians or Abyssinians or tribes of central Africa made use of coffee in ancient times, coffee’s prevalence as both a wild and cultivated plant and its use by modern natives, as observed by Europeans from the seventeenth century onward, suggest ways caffeine may have been ingested before recorded history. A credible tradition holds that in Africa, before the tenth century, a wine was fermented from the pulp of ripe coffee berries, and we have already seen that the Galla warriors rolled the fruit into larded balls, which they carried as rations. Some say that in the eleventh century, the practice of boiling raw, unripe coffee beans in their husks to make a drink was instituted in Ethiopia. Sir Richard Burton’s vivid account of coffee use in the wilds of nineteenth-century Africa includes a description of boiling unripe berries before chewing them like tobacco and handing them out to guests when they visit.
In the early 1880s, Jean Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), the French expatriate Symbolist ex-poet, laid plans to visit Africa to write a book for the Geographical Society, including maps and engravings, on “Harar and Gallaland.”54 As far as we know, he never got further than writing the title, complete with publisher and projected publication date: THE GALLAS, by J.-ARTHER RIMBAUD, East-African Explorer, with Maps and Engravings, Supplemented with Photographs by the Author; Available from H. Oudin, Publishers, 10, rue de Mézieres, Paris, 1891. Although he never wrote the book, Rimbaud traveled among the Galla, becoming, to his embarrassment, on several solitary expeditions, the first white man the tribal women had ever seen. While among the tribesmen, he partook of their foods, which included green coffee beans cooked in butter.55 A testimonial to coffee’s importance can be found in a letter in which he writes of his distaste at being forced to share coffee with the bandit Mohammed Abou-Beker, the powerful sultan of Zeila, who preyed on European travelers and traders and controlled the passage of all trading caravans as well as the slave trade. Rimbaud needed Abou-Beker’s sanction to travel in that area, and this would not be forthcoming before participating in the ritual sharing of coffee, brought, at the clap of the sultan’s hands by a servant “who comes running from the next straw hut to bring el boun, the coffee.”56
Photograph of Arab peasants making coffee in Gaza, c. 1885–1901. The print is from an albumen photograph taken by Bonfils, who was active from 1864 to 1916. We can see all the stages of the process: the man seated on the left roasts the beans in a pan, the man seated on the right grinds them with a pestle, while the man seated in the center oversees the boiling pot and the remaining man stands with a tiny cup ready to drink the brew. (Photograph by Bonfils, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, negative #s4–142208)
We do not know all the details of the earliest Arab preparations. The best information is that, when Arab traders brought coffee back to their homeland from Africa for planting, they made two dissimilar caffeinated drinks from the coffee berry. The first was “kisher” a tealike beverage steeped from the fruit’s dried husks, which, according to every authority, tastes nothing like our coffee, but rather something like an aro matic or spiced tea. In the Yemen, kisher, brewed from the husks that had been roasted together with some of the silver skin, was regarded as a delicate drink and was the choice of the connoisseur. The second was “bounya” its name deriving from “bunn” the Ethiopian and early Arabic word for coffee beans, a thick brew of ground or crushed beans. It was probably drunk unfiltered, and, in a practice persisting for several hundred years, downed with its sediment, a drink that could fairly be called “sludge.” Early bounya was made from raw, boiled beans. A Levantine refinement introduced the technique of roasting the beans on stone trays, before boiling them in water, then straining and reboiling them with fresh water, in a process repeated several times, and the thick residue stored in large clay jars for later service in tiny cups. In another development, the beans were powdered with a mortar and pestle after roasting and then mixed with boiling water. In a practice that persisted for several hundred years, the resulting drink was swallowed complete with the grounds. Later in the sixteenth century Islamic coffee drinkers invented the ibrik, a small coffee boiler that made brewing easier and quicker. Cinnamon, cloves, sugar might be added while still boiling, and the “essence of amber” could be added after the coffee was doled out in small china cups.57 A cover was affixed to the boiler a few years later, creating the prototype of the modern coffeepot.
Infusion was the latest arrival, its development dating only from the eighteenth century. Ground coffee was placed in a cloth bag, which was itself deposited in the pot, and upon which hot water was poured, steeping the grounds as we steep tea. However, boiling continued as the favorite way of preparing the drink for many years.
The Origin of the Word
In pursuing the origin of the uses of the coffee bean, we are led on a chase reminiscent of Scheherazade’s tales in the Arabian Nights. We are quickly lost in a world where names of things and people and places are confounded and uncertain, and where the central subject of our speculation seems to simply have appeared, like a jinn, without revealing the secret of its provenance even to living witnesses of its advent.
The word “coffee” itself is the best example of this dubietous panorama of the fabulous and the real. The word enters English by way of the French “café” which, like the words “caffé” in Italian, “koffie” in Dutch, and “Kaffee” in German, derive from the Turkish “kahveh” which in turn derives from the Arabic word “qahwa” Of this much we may be sure. But once we inquire into the origin of the Arabic word, we are quickly lost in a labyrinth of tantalizing, mutually exclusive etymological conjectures.
One etymological theory with considerable academic support is that the word “qahwa” in Arabic comes from a root that means “making something repugnant, or lessening someone’s desire for something.”58 “Qahwa,” in the old poetry, was a venerable word for wine, as something that dulls the appetite for food. In later usage, it came to refer to other psychoactive beverages, such as khat, a strong stimulating drink infused from the leaves of the kafta plant, Catha edulis, which is still popular in the Yemen. This theory holds that the Sufis took the old word for wine and applied it to the new beverage, coffee. The notion seems particularly appealing when we consider that the Sufi mystics, who sought to empty their minds of circumstantial distractions by whirling furiously until entering an ecstatic state, and who were constrained, like all Muslims, from drinking wine, used wine and intoxication in their poetry as sensual emblems of divine afflatus;59 they might have happily used the word for this forbidden wine to name the new, permitted brew, a drink that would in fact help to sustain their devotions. A variation of this theory is that, just as the word “qahwa” was used for wine because it diminished the desire for food, it was naturally used for coffee because it diminishes the desire for sleep.
At least one old Arab account s
ays that what we call coffee today borrowed its name directly from the drink brewed from kafta, or khat, after the redoubtable al-Dhabhani recommended to friends that they substitute coffee for the qahwa made from kafta, when supplies of the latter were exhausted. According to this notion, coffee is a kind of poor man’s khat, to which the Sufis resorted only when khat was unavailable. This preference may still obtain today in the Yemen, where the more profitable cultivation of khat, despite government efforts to discourage khat’s use, is increasingly displacing the cultivation of coffee.60
Still another etymology, but one with slight lexicographical authority, traces the word “coffee” to “quwwa” or “cahuha,” which means “power” or “strength,” holding that the drink was named for what we now recognize as the envigorating effects of caffeine. A story advancing this etymology is that, toward the middle of the fifteenth century, a poor Arab traveling in Abyssinia stooped near a stand of trees. He cut down a tree covered with berries for firewood in order to prepare his dinner of rice. Once done eating, he noticed that the partially roasted berries were fragrant and that, when crushed, their aroma increased. By accident, he dropped some of them into his scanty water supply. He discovered that the foul water was purified. When he returned to Aden, he presented the beans to the mufti, who had been an opium addict for years. When the mufti tried the roasted berries, he at once recovered his health and vigor and dubbed the tree of their origin, “cahuha.”61
An evocative etymology provided for the word “coffee” links it to the region of Kaffa (now usually spelled “Kefa”) in Ethiopia, which is today one of Africa’s noted growing districts.62 Some say that because the plant was first grown in that region, and was possibly first infused as a beverage there, the Arabs named it after that place. Others, with equally little authority, turn this story on its head and claim that the district was named for the bean.
But perhaps the best fabulous etymology combines two of these theories and throws in a prototypical Arabian fantasy of the divine, the demonic, and the marvelous. It accepts that coffee was named for Kaffa and at the same time links the word “qahwa” in the sense of “wanting no more,” to the name of the district. The idea is based on several Islamic tales that derive the name “Kaffa” from the same Arabian root for “it is enough” as mentioned above:
A priest…is said to have conceived the design of wandering from the East towards Western Africa in order to extend the religion of the prophet, and when he came into the regions where Kaffa lies, Allah is reported to have appeared to him and to have said, “It is far enough; go no further.” Since that time, according to tradition, the country has been called Kaffa.63
There, of course, the priest promptly discovered a coffee tree laden with red berries, which berries he immediately boiled, naming the brew after the place to which Allah had led him.
2
tea
Asian Origins
If Christianity is wine, and Islam coffee, Buddhism is most certainly tea.
—Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (1957)
From ancient times, the Chinese have elaborated a pretense of tradition and descent that can best be described as a dream of antiquity in a time that never was. Affecting to trace her customs, philosophies, and pedigrees to a more venerable age than those of other nations, the Chinese culture has, in the mirror of mythological history, assumed the cloak of dignity that accords with precedence. Because tea has long been uniquely prominent in Chinese life, an effort to locate its origin in the remote past became inevitable.
Such an effort was realized in the legend of Shen Nung, mythical first emperor of China, a Promethean figure, honored as the inventor of the plow and of husbandry, expositor of the curative properties of plants, and, most important for our story, the discoverer of tea. According to the legend, Shen Nung sat down in the shade of a shrub to rest in the heat of the day. Following a logic of his own that would have appeared mysterious to an onlooker, he decided to cool off by building a fire and boiling some water to drink, a practice he had begun after noticing that those who drank boiled water fell sick less often than those who imbibed directly from the well. He fed his fire with branches from a tea bush, and a providential breeze knocked a few of the tiny leaves into his pot. When Shen Nung drank the resulting infusion, he became the first to enjoy the stimulant effect and delicate refreshment of tea.1
Shen Nung, true to his cognomen, “Divine Healer,” details the medicinal uses of ch’a, or tea, in the Pen ts’ao, a book-length compilation of his medical records, dated, with daunting precision by much later scholars, at 2737 B.C. The entries in this book include unmistakable references to the diuretic, antibacterial, bronchodilating, stimulating, and mood-enhancing effects we now attribute to caffeine:
Good for tumours or abscesses that come about the head, or for ailments of the bladder. It [ch’a] dissipates heat caused by the phlegms, or inflammation of the chest. It quenches thirst. It lessens the desire for sleep. It gladdens and cheers the heart.2
In fact, the earliest edition of the Pen ts’ao dates from the Neo-Han dynasty (A.D. 25 to 221), and even this book does not yet mention tea. The tea reference was interpolated after the seventh century, at which time the word “ch’a” first came into widespread use.
Another traditional account purporting to tell about the early use of tea by an ancient emperor says that, as early as the twelfth century B.C., tribal leaders in and around Szechuan included tea in their offerings to Emperor Wen, duke of Chou and founder of the Chou dynasty (1122–256 B.C.). Wen was a legendary folk hero and purported author of the Erh Ya, the first Chinese dictionary. However, because the earliest extant source for this tea tribute is the Treatise on the Kingdom of Huayang, by Chang Ju, a history of the era written in A.D. 347,3 the story is not very helpful in establishing that tea was used in China before the first millennium B.C.
To Lao Tzu (600–517 B.C.), the founder of Taoism, is ascribed, by a Chinese text of the first century B.C., the notion that tea is an indispensable constituent of the elixir of life. The Taoist alchemists, his followers, who sought the secret of immortality, certainly believed this, dubbing tea “the froth of the liquid jade.” (Unlike their Western counterparts, who searched for both the secret of eternal life and the power to turn base metal into gold, the Chinese alchemists confined their quest to improving health and extending life.) The custom of offering tea to guests, still honored in China, supposedly began in an encounter that occurred toward the end of Lao Tzu’s life. An embittered and disillusioned man, the spiritual leader, having seen his teachings dishonored in his own land and foreseeing a national decline, drove westward on a buffalo-cart, intending to leave China for the wild wastes of Ta Chin in central Asia, an area that later became part of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. The customs inspector at the Han Pass border gate turned out to be Yin Hsi, an elderly sage who had waited his entire life in the previously unsatisfied expectation of encountering an avatar. Recognizing the holy fugitive and rising to the occasion, Yin Hsi stopped Lao Tzu, served him tea, and, while they drank, persuaded him to commit his teachings to the book that became the revered Tao Te Ching, or The Book of Tao.
Probably what was genuinely the earliest reference in Chinese literature adducing the capacity of tea, through what we now know is the agency of caffeine, to improve mental operations is found in the Shin Lun, by Hua Tuo (d. 220 B.C.). In this book, the famous physician and surgeon, credited with discovering anesthesia, taught that drinking tea improved alertness and concentration, a clear reference to what we today understand as caffeine’s most prominent psychoactive effects: “To drink k’u t’u [bitter t’u] constantly makes one think better.”4
Awareness of caffeine’s efficacy as a mood elevator was also evidenced in Liu Kun, governor of Yan Chou and a leading general of the Qin dynasty (221–206 B.C.), who wrote to his nephew, asking to be sent some “real tea” to alleviate his depression. In 59 B.C., in Szechuan, Wang Bao wrote the first book known to provide instructions for buying
and preparing tea.5 The volume was a milestone in tea history, establish ing that, by its publication date, tea had become an important part of diet, while remaining in use as a drug.
One of the most entertaining stories about tea to emerge from Oriental religious folklore is a T’ang dynasty (618–906 A.D.) Chinese or Japanese story about the introduction of tea to China. This story teaches that tea’s creation was a miracle worked by a particularly holy man, born of his self-disgust at his inability to forestall sleep during prayer. The legend tells of the monk Bodhidharma, famous for founding the school of Buddhism based on meditation, called “Ch’an,” which later became Zen Buddhism, and for bringing this religion from India to China around A.D. 525. Supposedly, the emperor of China had furnished the monk with his own cave near the capital, Nanging, where he would be at leisure to practice the precursor of Zen meditation. There the Bodhidharma sat unmoving, year after year. From the example of his heroic endurance, it is easy to understand how his school of Buddhism evolved into za-zen, or “sitting meditation,” for certainly sitzfleisch was among his outstanding capacities.6 The tale is that, after meditating seated before a wall for nine years, he finally fell asleep. When he awoke and discovered his lapse, he disgustedly cut off his eyelids. They fell to the ground and took root, growing into tea bushes containing a stimulant that was to sustain meditations forever after.
The Origin of the Word and the Drink
The World of Caffeine Page 6