8. We regret our inability to determine the first names of some of the scientists mentioned in our book.
CHAPTER 1
coffee
1. Dr. William Adams, professor at the University of Kentucky and author of Nubia, told us in an interview in 1997, “There is absolutely no evidence, textual or archaelogical, of any use of coffee in Nubia or Abyssinia before modern times.”
2. For example, we have no accounts from the Crusaders (c. 1100–1300) that mention encounters with coffee.
3. Reverend Doctor J.Lewis Krapf, Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours During Eighteen Years Residence in Eastern Africa, p. 47.
4. James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile.
5. Perhaps, in addition to knowledge of the plant, the prerequisite for the spread of coffee is the discovery of the methods of roasting and infusing the bean. People seem to have entertained a limited inclination to chew the fruit, even when it had been kneaded with lard or butter, and, although swilling heavily reboiled raw coffee and swallowing the grounds gained a little more acceptance, roasting and infusion were the watershed inventions that transformed coffee from a rank medicinal powder or murky sedimented syrup into a beverage coveted for its flavor as well as its stimulating effects. Yet, in the end, even this answer does not completely resolve the mystery, because the flesh of the coffee berry is fragrant and good tasting and fully charged with caffeine. In fact, its apparent appeal adds a puzzle: Why did the use of the bean spread, despite the dislike expressed by so many for its taste, while the eating of the pleasant fruit remained a localized curiosity?
6. William Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 8, quoting from Dufour’s translation.
7. Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna, p. 36.
8. Ulla Heise, Coffee and Coffee-Houses, p. 11, quoting Liber canonis, Tractatus secundus, 1608, chapter 90.
9. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 8.
10. William Gohlman, The Life of Ibn Sina, p. 36. Also see Goodman, Avicenna, p. 45, n. 13. The value of this resource, afterward destroyed by Suni zealots opposed to the Sultan’s Shiite sympathies, should not be underestimated. In later life, Avicenna recalls rooms full of books dedicated to each subject, ancient or modern, where he saw “books whose titles are unknown to many, and which I never saw before or since.”
11. That a leading thinker such as Avicenna should have mentioned the coffee bean and described some of its properties only deepens the mystery of the absence of any further references for several hundred years.
12. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 8, quoting Leonhard Rauwolf, Aigentliche beschreibung der Raisis so er vor diser zeit gegen auffgang inn die morgenlaender vilbracht, Lauingen, 1582–83.
13. Giovanni Battista Montanus (1488–1551), Italian physician and classicist, tells us in his Commentary that Avicenna wrote the Canon “because he saw that neither the Greeks nor the Arabs had any book that would teach the art of medicine as an integrated subject.” See Nancy Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy, p. 20. See also, Goodman, Avicenna, p. 47, n. 38.
14. Anonymous editor, Canon of Medicine, “Introduction,” no page, found in the library of the University of Pennsylvania.
15. Francis Ross Carpenter, in The Classic of Tea, p. 35, referencing Reinaud, Relations des Voyage fait par les Arabes et les Persans dans l’Inde et…la Chine, I, 1845, p. 40.
16. The Odyssey, translated by Samuel Butler, Book IV, lines 219–34. Pæeon was a celebrated physician, mentioned also by Virgil and Ovid, with a truly upscale practice. He treated the wounds which the gods received during the Trojan War. On his account, physicians were sometimes called Poeeonii and medicinal herbs Poeeonoe herboe.
17. Robert Fitzgerald aptly translates the phrase as “an anodyne.”
18. Heinrich Eduard Jacob, Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity, p. 74, quoting Simon André Tissot, Von der Gesundheit de Gelehrten, Leipzig, 1769.
19. Sir Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant, pp. 20–21.
20. See John DeMers, The Community Kitchen’s Complete Guide to Gourmet Coffee.
21. Jacob, Epic of a Commodity, p. 44.
22. The Arab legends of the first encounter with coffee, invariably set in Ethiopia or the Yemen, are often stocked with the full range of fabulous Oriental devices that are the mark of Islamic legends. One of these, an entry in the Omar cycle, is, in particular, worth our attention, and so begins
The Tale of Amorous Acolyte: A Giant Ghost, Swirling Water, a Beautiful Princess, and the Coffee Tree
In the year 656 A.H. the mollah Schadheli, making his holy pilgrimage to Mecca in the company of Omar, his disciple, came as far as the wilderness of Ousab, to the Emerald Mountain. At once, he knew he would go no further.
“It is the will of Allah, blessed be his Name, that this very night I should die on this mountain,” he told Omar. “When I am gone, a veiled personage will appear to you. Take care to obey his commands!” So saying, Schadheli entered the cave, lay upon a spread of cloth, and waited.
True to his word, as a religious man of honor, Schadheli died that night. Soon after, Omar, leaving the side of the body to refresh himself with the night air, was startled by a flash of light which, when his bedazzled eyes could again see, had left behind a giant spectre draped in a white veil. Summoning his courage, Omar demanded that the figure reveal his name. The phantom said nothing, but when he removed the veil, Omar recognized his late master, grown to height of thirty feet.
The giant visage stamped his foot on the rocky ground, splitting it, and a fountain of pure water burst from within the earth.
“Fill your bowl with water from this fountain,” the spirit told Omar, his ghostly form already fading against the black desert sky and the jewel-like stars. Then, just before vanishing, he added, “Carry the bowl towards Mocha while the water yet swirls!”
Omar turned southward and set out toward the famous port. After journeying for three days and nights without food or sleep, holding the bowl before him and glancing continually to see if the water still turned within, suddenly he noticed it had stopped moving. When he looked up he saw that he had arrived in Mocha, where he soon discovered the people were suffering greatly from a terrible plague. Omar’s prayers cured all who came before him. His reputation for healing spread quickly among the wise, reaching the ear of the vizier, a clever counselor to the Sultan. The Sultan, a trusting man, had a beautiful daughter whom he loved above all things and who lay as if dead within her chambers. He heeded his advisor by sending for the holy physician. Omar cured the girl and, entranced by her loveliness, made love to her as soon as she awoke.
With forbearance compelled by his gratitude for the city’s rescue, and with the encouragement of his vizier, to whom Omar had given an amatory talisman (which made him irresistible in love), the Sultan spared Omar’s life but exiled him back to the wilds of Ousab, where, as before, the holy man was left with only herbs for food and a cave for shelter.
Wearying of solitude and the barren waste, Omar cried out to his dead master, “Why have you sent me on this circular and ill-fated journey?” As if in response, a small green bird alighted in a nearby tree. When Omar came near, he saw the tree was covered with green leaves, small white flowers, and bright red fruit. He filled a basket with the berries, and later that night, when preparing to boil his dinner of herbs, he thought to break open the fruit and toss the seeds into the pot in their stead. The result, to his amazement and delight, was the aromatic and fortifying beverage we know today as coffee.
Others say that Omar’s master gave him a small wooden ball which rolled of its own as if alive, instructing him to scrabble after until it stopped moving. The ball led him to a village where he effected cures by dispensing the boiled red berries of a stand of wild coffee trees growing nearby.
23. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 15.
24. Ibid., p. 14.
25. Ibid., p. 74.
26. The time of caffeine’s early proliferation was a turbulent one in the Yemen. The Pashas of San’a, who r
uled the tiny domain, were appointed by either the sultan of Constantinople or the Ottoman Pasha in Cairo, depending on which of them had the upper hand that particular year. Until 1547, control of the Yemeni port city of Aden was contested between the Ottomans and the Portuguese, who had established bases on the Abyssinian side of the Red Sea. Although the Ottomans briefly succeeded in closing off trade from the area, within decades spices, especially pepper, were again reaching Egypt by way of the Yemen and the ports of the Hijaz. The imams, or local chiefs, enriched by trade and encouraged by ambitious Europeans, successfully contested Ottoman authority in San’a, so the spice traffic flourished again. This traffic was decisively and permanently rediverted only when the Dutch and English developed the Cape route to the East in the seventeenth century. Fortunately for the Yemen’s economic health, by that time coffee was already replacing spices as its most important item of trade. See Kamal S.Salibi, A History of Arabia, p. 150.
27. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 61.
28. The Bacchoe is a play which, as William Arrowsmith comments in his introduction to his translation, is dimly reminiscent of the unsettling invasion of Hellas by the cult of Dionysus, an occurrence with obvious parallels to the advent of the coffeehouse culture in Islam.
29. One interesting detail of the testimony was a physician’s assertion that Bengiazlah, a famous contemporary of Avicenna, had taught that, according to humoral theory, coffee must be regarded as “hot and dry,” not as unwholesomely “cold and dry,” as Beg’s witnesses claimed. Even at this early time, however, uncertainty prevailed about the meaning of the reference, and coffee’s opponents answered that Bengiazlah had not been speaking of coffee at all, but of a drink also known as “kahwe” but made from a different plant.
30. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 77.
31. Such references are scattered throughout Reis’ in die Morgenländer (Rauwolf’s Travels), published at Frankfurt and Lauingen in 1582–83.
32. Joseph Walsh, Coffee: Its History, Classification, and Description, p. 7.
33. Ibid., p. 6.
34. Robert Nicol, A Treatise on Coffee: its properties and the best mode of keeping and preparing it, pp. 11–12.
35. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, p. 581.
36. Walsh, Coffee: Its History, p. 7.
37. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 106, quoting Jaziri.
38. Ibid., p. 111, quoting Jaziri.
39. Ibid., p. 110, quoting Celibi.
40. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 30, quoting Jean La Roque, Voyage de L’Arabie Heureuse, Paris, 1716.
41. Between 600 B.C. and A.D. 1900 the population of the Yemen remained almost constant at about 2.5 million. It was called, together with Oman, Arabia Felix, or “Fortunate Arabia” by the classical geographer Ptolemy. The Yemen’s moderate climate contrasts with that of the barren interior of the Arabian peninsula, which Ptolemy called Arabia Deserta, or “Desert Arabia,” and that of the Hijaz, which he called Arabia Petroea, or “Stony Arabia.” Although only 10 percent of the total area of the peninsula, the Yemen has consistently sustained about 50 percent of Arabia’s population since the introduction of agriculture in the third millennium B.C. These circumstances have both isolated the Yemen and helped define its identity, making it a kind of oasis of activity, surrounded by the ocean on one side and desert on the other, relatively remote from the major capitals of the world.
42. We can even surmise something about the date before which coffee could not have come into great prominence in Islam from the absence of any mention of coffee or coffeehouses by Antonio Menavino, who, in 1548, did not include coffee in a list of drinks drunk by the Turks. Nor did Pierre Belon mention the plant in 1558 in his list of Arabia’s plants.
43. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, Traitez Nouveux & curieux Du Café, Du Thé et Du Chocolate, p. 37.
44. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, pp. 81–82, quoting Pedro Teixeira, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira.
45. Ibid., p. 81, quoting Jean de Thévenot, Suite de Voyage du Levant, Amsterdam, 1727.
46. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 82, quoting George Sandys.
47. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 99, quoting Thévenot.
48. Carston Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia and other countries in the East, vol. I, p. 126.
49. Ibid., p. 73.
50. W.B. Seabrook, Adventures in Arabia, p. 72.
51. Ibid., pp. 34–35.
52. Ibid., p. 108.
53. Ibid., pp. 172–73.
54. Alain Borer, Rimbaud in Abyssinia, p. 180.
55. Ibid., pp. 183–84.
56. Ibid., p. 186, quoting Arthur Rimbaud, letter to M. de Gaspary, Aden, November 9, 1887.
57. Edward Bramah, Tea & Coffee, p. 106.
58. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, p. 18.
59. This symbolic use of wine and intoxication is brilliantly exemplified in the original Persian of the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam. Although the poem was hypnotically, musically, and sensually rendered into English by Fitzgerald, this familiar version, steeped in the celebration of sexual and alcoholic dissipation, is a reflection more of the hedonistic dream world of late Victorian repression in which the translator lived than it is of the spiritual life of the tenth-century Sufi author. For a version that purports to be truer to the original, see The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, translated by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.
60. Encyclopoedia Britannica, “Arabia” (Yemen: Arab Republic), vol. 10, p. 906.
61. Harper’s Weekly, New York, January 21, 1911.
62. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, map, p. 79.
63. Krapf, Travels, Researches,p. 46.
CHAPTER 2
tea
1. Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, p. 605.
2. Quoted in Ukers, All about Tea, vol. I, p. 1.
3. Kit Chow and Ione Kramer, All the Tea in China, p. 2.
4. Quoted in Ukers, All about Tea, vol. I, p. 3.
5. Chow and Kramer, All the Tea in China, p. 3.
6. According to legend, Bodhidharma carried meditation too far, and his legs atrophied from disuse and dropped off. For this reason, images of him are generally legless and are sometimes called “snowmen.”
7. Lü Yu, Classic of Tea, p. 12.
8. Adapted from Carpenter, ibid., p. 15.
9. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, p. 149.
10. Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, p. 596.
11. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, p. 149.
12. Chow and Kramer, All the Tea in China, p. 3.
13. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, p. 149.
14. Jennifer Anderson, Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual, p. 21.
15. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, p. 50.
16. This reference appears in Chang Yu-hsin’s book, A Record of Waters for Boiling Teas.
17. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, p. 150.
18. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, p. 72.
19. Ibid., pp. 105–7.
20. Ibid., pp. 107–9.
21. Ibid., p. 116.
22. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 12.
23. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, p. 17.
24. Rand Castile, The Way of Tea, p. 49.
25. Ibid., p. 30.
26. Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 11.
27. Schapira et al., Book of Coffee and Tea, p. 148.
28. J. Anderson, Japanese Tea Ritual, p. 14.
29. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, notes to p. 61, pp. 158–59.
30. J. Anderson, Japanese Tea Ritual, p. 17.
31. Ibid., p. 18.
32. Castile, The Way of Tea, p. 49.
33. J. Anderson, Japanese Tea Ritual, p. 21.
34. Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, p. 597.
CHAPTER 3
cacao
1. Marcia Morton and Frederic Morton, Chocolate: An Illustrated History, pp. 3–4.
2. Sophie Coe and Michael Coe, The True History of Chocolate, p.
73.
3. Morton and Morton, Chocolate, pp. 3–4.
4. Coe and Coe, True History, p. 78.
5. Ibid., p. 97.
6. Other explorers had the same experience. In The Conquest of New Spain, the seventeenth-century explorer Bernal Diaz describes how the Aztecs “brought him in cups of pure gold a drink made from the cocoa plant, which they said he took before visiting his wives.”
7. Morton and Morton, Chocolate, p. 4.
8. Nelson Foster and Linda Cordell, ed., Chilies to Chocolate, p. 105.
9. Ibid. Yet there is the Spanish painting of the gifts of the Magi, done about 1501, in which an American Indian is shown proffering a bowl of what looks like cacao.
10. Coe and Coe, True History, pp. 37–39. See also “Maya Writing,” David Stuart and Stephen D.Houston, Scientific American, August 1989, pp. 82–89.
11. Foster and Cordell, Chilies to Chocolate, pp. 105–8.
12. Coe and Coe, True History, pp. 48–49. Also see David Stuart, “The Rio Azul Cacao Pot: Epigraphic Observations on the Function of a Maya Ceramic Vessel,” Antiquity 62 (1988): 153–157.
13. Which we assume were all criollo.
14. Coe and Coe, True History, p. 51.
15. Ibid., p. 87.
16. Ibid., p. 12, quoting Gage.
17. Ibid., pp. 11–12, quoting Gage.
CHAPTER 4
monks and men-at-arms
1. Coe and Coe, True History, p. 107. The Coes point out that the money reference was an interpolation found in the Italian edition but not in the lost original. The Coes’ quotation is adapted from Samuel Morison, Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, New York: Heritage Press, 1963, p. 327.
2. Barbara Grunes and Phyllis Magida, Chocolate Classics, p. 3.
3. Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effect of Coffee, p. 40. We note that a different answer to a similar question about coffee’s permissibility during a time of fasting was reached in Turkey. According to Moseley, “The Turks who frequently subsist a considerable time upon Coffee only, look on it as an aliment that affords great nourishment to the body:—for which reason, during the rigid fast of the Ramadam, or Turkish Lent, it is not only forbid, but any person is deemed to have violated the injunctions of his Prophet, that has had even the smell of Coffee.”
The World of Caffeine Page 51