I love looking forward to my morning coffee the night before, dreaming about it while I am sleeping, and, against all reason, even leaving my warm bed to get it started. I love smelling the grounds and measuring them into my filter and pouring (or, in my case, if your teakettle has lost its lid and you are using a soup ladle for the moment, scooping) boiling water over it. I love watching the water drip over the grounds into my cup--which, by the way, is glass, so that I can see the magical process--and turn into coffee or, in Turkish, kahveh, from the Arabic قهوة, qahwah.
From what I can find out, coffee came to us from Yemen: according to Wikipedia, the "first credible evidence" we have of people drinking coffee dates from the mid-fifteenth century at a Sufi Muslem monastery in Mocha, Yemen. From there, coffee spread to the rest of the Middle East, Persia, Turkey, and northern Africa; to Venice, the trade-route link between East and West; and then to the rest of Europe.
Pope Clement VIII, instead of banning the "Muslim drink," wisely blessed coffee--in Italian, caffè--in 1600. Or maybe I should say that he "allowed," instead of "blessed," coffee. The first European coffee house began serving coffee to Romans in 1645.
A now-discounted tale claims that, in 1683, Viennese bakers, who as a matter of course stayed up all night to make pastries for breakfast coffee, heard the Ottomans tunneling under the besieged city and sounded the alarm, thus saving the citizens. In celebration of the victory of Christendom over the Turkish Empire, the bakers formed their pastries into the shape of the crescent on the Islamic flag.
Of course, as a writer newly restored by coffee, I would just as soon reinstate this story to the canon. What could be more perfect than freshly brewed coffee and newly baked croissants?
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