The World of Caffeine (16 page)

From the end of the seventeenth century, both coffee and tea services began to assume their modern forms. The first English silver teapot, with a nearly conical shape, was made in 1670. Between 1650 and 1700, the broad flat Chinese bowls were more and more frequently placed on saucers. However, the practice of pouring the coffee from the bowl into the saucer persisted even after handles had been devised for the bowls. This upside-down way of drinking remained customary until the end of the eighteenth century, when drinking from the saucer became socially frowned upon.

Man and Child Drinking Tea,
artist unknown, c. 1725. This painting is sometimes called
Tea Party in the Time of George I.
The silver equipage includes a silver container and cover, a hexagonal tea canister, a hot water jug or milk jug, slop bowl, teapot, and sugar tongs. The cups and saucers are Chinese export porcelain, which was in good supply in the colonies as well as throughout Europe. (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

It was also in the eighteenth century that the Germans became adept at designing and producing fine porcelain teapots. By the century’s close, the full development and importance of the modern equipage in Germany is evident in the words of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), the Romantic German painter of spiritual, desolate, and brooding landscapes, in a letter to his family, dated January 28, 1818: “Coffee drum, coffee grinder, coffee siphon, coffee sack, coffee pot, coffee cup have become necessaries; everything, everything has become necessary.”
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By the Biedermeier period (c. 1815–48) in Germany and Austria coffee and tea machines and the accompanying porcelain equipage became widely recognized status symbols. Paintings from the period illustrate that the social rank of a family might be accurately estimated from the deliberate display of the items necessary to take morning coffee or tea.

Beethoven (1770–1827) avidly drank coffee, a habit which he pursued with meticulous, almost numerological, particularity:

However, in Beethoven’s day, because royal edicts interfered with and sometimes prohibited the consumption of coffee and tea, these caffeinated beverages were not widely accepted in Germany and Sweden as they had long been throughout most of Europe.

Caffeine was accepted more slowly in Germany and the rest of central Europe (except Vienna) than it had been in Western Europe.
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This meant that England and France began to take the caffeine cure about eighty years before their central European neighbors, who continued, during this time, drinking alcohol heavily as before. At a time when the English, for example, had already started to “dry out,” Germans were largely innocent of temperate alternatives to beer. Once the Germans, Hungarians, and other East Europeans became caffeine converts, coffee and coffeehouses became indispensable fixtures of the society and tea and chocolate came into general use across the breadth of the old Hapsburg Empire.

Beer was Germany’s old love, and one to which, despite an intense dalliance with wine after the establishment of trade with ancient Rome, its countrymen returned, as not only their favorite intoxicant but also as the primary source of nutrition for the peasantry. Although it may turn many stomachs today, beer for breakfast was standard fare among the common people from the close of the Middle Ages onward to well into the eighteenth century.

After the use of beer had returned to Germany, German beer was shipped from Hamburg to Holland, Sweden, Denmark, and Russia. In a war between Hamburg and Denmark, two-thirds of the expenditures for provisions went to buy beer. It was recorded in account books of the Hanseatic League that German sailors drank an average of three gallons of beer a day. In 1400, a census of trades in Hamburg listed more than twelve hundred people, nearly half of whom were employed in brewing or cooping.
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Beer is nothing if not fattening, and it would seem that its heavy consumption contributed to the fact that, as far as we can tell, toward the end of the Middle Ages a large number of northern Europe’s population developed beer bellies. Fat people begin to predominate in northern European art as
zaftig
became the prevalent body type in northwestern and northeastern Europe. From 1400 to 1700 a kind of cult of obesity developed, which equated corpulence with health, talent, and position. In reaction to this celebration of blubber, Jacob Balde (1604–68), Alsatian Jesuit, Latin poet, and famous preacher, founded the Congregatio Macilentorum, or the “Society of the Lean,” a group that faced a challenge for, in Heinrich Jacob’s words, “in 1638 a slim and upright German figure had become a rarity among the well-to-do; one and all of them were pot-bellied.”
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At the height of beer’s popularity, in the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, it was brewed and consumed primarily at home and only exceptionally in public houses. Many Germans of all classes were two-fisted drinkers during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). Pickling their brains in booze, whether beer, brandy, or wine, was the almost universal recourse for those who were suffering under the depredations and dislocations of a ruinous internecine war and its aftermath.
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The German resistance to adopting new habits was reinforced in relation to coffee in the seventeenth century by a travelogue,
Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der Mus-cowitisch und Persischen Reyse
(1656), written by Adam Olearius
(Oelschlaeger) (1599–1671), an Orientalist who served as astronomer, surveyor, and interpreter for his traveling party. Olearius’ book was primarily a factual account of a diplomatic mission (1635–39), undertaken by the author with Paul Fleming (1609–40), a German poet, at the prompting of the duke of Holstein. The mission’s purpose was to establish a trading company to do business with Persia, cutting out the Dutch and English middlemen. The book also included accounts of local customs and stories encountered along the way, and, in an entry dated 1637, Olearius provides this description of Persian coffee drinking and of the appearance of unroasted beans: “They drink with their tobacco a certain black water, which they call
cahwa,
made of fruit brought out of Egypt, and which is in colour like ordinary wheat, and in taste like Turkish wheat, and is of the bigness of a little bean.”
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One of the tales his book tells is the legend about a king of Persia who had become so addicted to coffee that he turned away from women:

This lurid story helped dissuade generations of Germans from becoming coffee drinkers and was used by beer and wine merchants and other enemies of coffee to support their arguments. Olearius’ travelogue was translated into French by Wicquefort and published in Paris in 1666, and the tale’s repetition bolstered the faction in Marseilles that preached opposition to the black potion.

Nevertheless, coffee drinking made limited inroads in Germany in the seventeenth century. As in other countries, private persons had early isolated encounters with the bean. In 1631, for example, a German merchant from Merseburg was sent a parcel of coffee from a Dutch business associate. Unfortunately, his wife decided to improve the recipe that accompanied it by substituting chicken broth for water, and the resulting drink did little to spread the use of the beverage.
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Coffee was also promoted by printed pamphlets and street-criers. The drink was first sold publicly in temporary stalls, like that of Pascal the Armenian in Paris. In fact, the early spread of coffee drinking in Germany probably owes more to the influence of foreigners than to the example of the upper classes. In the early eighteenth century, Hamburg and Leipzig were the only German cities regularly visited by people from abroad, and it is no accident that the first German coffeehouse was founded by a Dutchman to serve the tastes of English merchants and sailors in Hamburg, and that the coffee used there was also an English import. Called the “English Coffee House,” it was opened in Hamburg by Dr. Cornelius Buntekuh in 1679, a man known throughout Europe for promoting the health and longevity benefits of drinking enormous amounts of tea daily. The first German advertisement for the sale of the caffeinated beverages appeared in the Frankfurt
Journal
of 1686: “Notice is hereby given to all and sundry, that all kinds of chocolate, coffee and tea, as well as raw coffee may be purchased at the premises of Matthia Guaitta, Italian in the Narnberger Hof.”
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Other coffeehouses were soon opened in other cities, in Regensburg in 1689, Leipzig in 1694, and Berlin in 1721. By about 1725 the coffeehouses in Germany had brought caffeine into broad use by the middle class, finally overcoming such stringent opposition as the threat by the bishop of Paderborn to levy high fines on coffee and place coffee drinkers in the stocks.

The wine dealers in France and Italy had resisted the incursion of coffee, and coffee met with similar opposition from alehouse keepers in Germany. The greatest obstacle to coffee use in Germany came not from interested merchants, however, but proceeded directly from the intercession of Frederick the Great (1712–86), who, in the course of a lifelong campaign against the bean, promulgated bans, taxes, and even a special police squad to keep his subjects safe from coffee’s threat to their health and pocketbooks.

In 1766, Frederick imposed a state monopoly on coffee imports. He decided that, although coffee was a suitable drink for the aristocracy, it served as a ruinous luxury for the common people. Following a strange theory of international commerce that is still current, he believed that, as a result of the German purchase of coffee beans from abroad, money would “flow out” of the country and deepen the economic distress. He also accepted the verdict of German physicians that coffee was bad for the health, especially the medical warnings that coffee caused effeminacy in men and sterility in women. He used his monopoly and authority to levy taxes in an attempt to restrict its use to the upper classes, causing much discontent among the populace.

Over the ensuing decades, Frederick continued and even expanded his war on coffee. He himself had been brought up on the old beer soup and reasoned that if beer soup was good enough for the monarch, it was good enough for his subjects. In a royal attempt to turn back the culinary clock, he issued the following proclamation on September 13, 1777:

His efforts were partially successful for a short period, and beer soup enjoyed a brief revival. However, as it had everywhere else, coffee’s progress ultimately proved ineluctable. By 1781, Frederick attempted to contain the evil by creating a royal monopoly on roasting, the
Declaration du Roi concernant la vente du café brûlé.
He granted special roasting licenses to the nobility, the clergy, and government officials, but even they had to buy the green beans from him. The license fees and the profits from the sales of beans made Frederick a fortune.

The average German was forced into seeking various unpleasant substitutes for coffee, including beverages brewed from wheat, barley, corn, dried figs, and chicory. (Many Germans resorted to similar replacements, with equally unsatisfactory results, during World War II.) The pursuit of real coffee created a thriving black market, which Frederick fought to suppress. A French minister whom he had charged with the enforcement of his edict created a special squad of agents, popularly called “coffee smellers” or “coffee sniffers,” to go among the people and sniff out violators by following the undisguisable aroma of roasting coffee. The spies, mostly wounded or retired soldiers from the last war, were given a quarter of all the fines they were responsible for collecting. Needless to say, the people considered them insufferable intruders.

From this period dates Bach’s famous “Coffee Cantata” (1732), a one-act comic operetta in which the excesses of both sides of the argument are satirized. Bach had read and been impressed by a frightful poem by Picander, a Leipzig poet, published as part of his
Parisian Fables
in 1727. The poem pretended to satirize the health debates in France and Louis XV’s grant of a state monopoly for coffee as a means of restricting its use to the court, but was obviously aimed closer to home, at German resistance to the new drink:

The French king is supposed to have relented only after his subjects began dying in droves, and the nation was saved. After Bach read this poem, he commissioned Picander to write a libretto for a cantata on the subject of the “coffee mania among women.” The resulting libretto tells the story of a father, Schlendrian, or “Slow Poke,” who attempts to dissuade his daughter, Lieschen, from using the dangerous drink. He enjoys a brief success when he threatens to interfere with her marriage plans. But when her mother and grandmother both start imbibing, his cause is lost. Lieschen’s overweening craving for coffee is expressed in the famous line, “Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine!”

Coffee use in Germany declined during Frederick’s campaign to control it and nearly vanished from Hamburg, its first German home. In Leipzig, however, it had taken firmer root. Known at this time as “little Paris,” it was a city which, until about 1750, set the cultural pace for the entire country. Richer and more powerful than Berlin or its closest rival, Dresden, Leipzig was not only a center of international trade but soon succeeded Frankfort-on-Main as the national center of book printing, so both merchants and the literati came there in great numbers. Leipzig became celebrated for its gardens and its coffeehouses, which developed distinct followings as the London coffeehouses had done generations before. The Kaffebaum was a favorite of university students. Ricter’s was a center for foreigners, travelers, and merchants, and people who were concerned with mounting the famous city fairs. It was a hangout as well for the intellectuals, such as the scholarly satirist Zachariae. As it had done in England, the coffeehouse culture began to jostle and awaken the literary taste, and a new German classical literary style sprouted from the arid Gottsched rococo period, marked by “spiritlessness” and “turgidity.”
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