In Praise of Coffee

One good thing about being a writer is that you get to leave the dishes in the sink when it's time to write. Or, maybe I should say, you get to make another cup of coffee and then leave the dishes in the sink.

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?

The Waffle Iron

Usually my waffle iron and I are on pretty good terms, an amazing state of affairs given my history with household appliances. Pretty good terms, that is, except for the wake-the-dead siren that sounds when the waffle is done--just in case I've fallen back to sleep while meditatively watching the hot water drip through the coffee in my cone filter into my French workman's glass.

Right now, though, the waffle iron is out of temper and the siren sounds like a drowning finch and the waffles stick something terrible. Breakfast is waffle top or waffle scrapings, or, worse yet, just plain old toast. Cleaning stuck waffle off the waffle iron becomes a task for later in the day, when I am feeling more pulled together. (I am not a lark nor much of an owl, I am a daytime, sunshine person.) And making waffles the next morning becomes an exercise in hope, or maybe I should say folly.

This is life, and I am resigned to that. Some days everybody is out of temper and a little grumbling and jostling are normal. But this morning, I did get a mostly whole waffle out of the waffle iron, or two, actually, and the waffle iron is not in the clean-later pile. Very good news.

The home electric waffle maker became a fixture of the well-appointed kitchen in the 1930s, right alongside the pop-up electric toaster. General Electric introduced the first commercial electric waffle maker in America in 1911; Bisquick, Aunt Jemima, and the rest introduced dry pancake and waffle mix in the 1930s; and the Dorsas brothers introduced frozen waffles, Eggos, in 1953.

Apparently the etymology of waffle is unclear or in dispute. According to the Wikipedia entry, waffle originally comes from a Frankish root, wafla, or honeycomb. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, waffle originally comes from Proto-Germanic wabila, honeycomb or web, with ties to Old High German weban and Old English wefan, to weave. And if the words "Frankish," "Proto-Germanic," and "Old English" don't leave you all aswoon, as they do me, I'm done now.

As for the second meaning of waffle, to waver, maybe I will tackle that some day when I am feeling indecisive.

Brewing Up Some Trouble

I'm the absent-minded-professor type. When I should be minding my p's and q's or making sure there are no obstacles in my path, I am thinking about the origin of the word coffee and its many wonderful synonyms. Well, yes, a cup of coffee would be good about now, and, as I told my historian friend, "More coffee, more Diane!"

Anyway, the etymology of coffee is in dispute (surprised?), but most sources agree that the word originated in Africa, where the Coffea plant grows, and came to us from the Arabic قهوة (qahwah), the Turkish kavfeh, and, through trade (ca. 1598) between the Ottoman Empire and Venice, the Italian caffè. (For another post, we got the concept of zero in much the same way.)

My favorite way to make coffee at home is right away, first thing in the morning.  Beyond that, I use a one-cup drip filter and cone. The problem here is that you have to take care of a lot of things, and without drinking any coffee first, I  might add. Find a clean cup. Boil water. Figure out where you are keeping the filters these days and fit filter paper into the cone. Measure out coffee. Pour boiling water over coffee into cup.

While my mind is in the ivory tower thinking about the origin of the word coffee, wondering if there are some lovely famous quotations about coffee like there are about tea, promising myself to look up the difference between moka and espresso, I discover that I forgot to buy coffee filters. And not for the first time, either!

What to do? Remember Harper, Paul Newman's detective character in a 1966 movie with Lauren Bacall playing his client. (Harper, directed by Jack Smight, performed by Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris, and others, Warner Bros.) Harper wakes up, bleary-eyed, stumbles around the kitchen trying to make coffee, finds that he is out of Chemex filters, and goes through the trash until he finds one he can use, all the while thinking about his next move in solving the case.