The World of Caffeine (7 page)

However, Walsh could not afford the luxury of a layover; and so, taking refreshment from an exhilarating breeze, he allowed himself to be helped onto his horse and made his way down the road.

Life among the Bedouins has always maintained a distinctive savor. W.B. Seabrook, in his book
Adventures in Arabia
(1927), gives a vivid account of coffee’s place in a timeless nomadic culture where lunch consisted of dried dates, bread, and fermented camel’s milk and the one cooked meal of each day was a whole carcass of a sheep or goat, served over rice and gravy:

Seabrook enjoyed the honor of sharing coffee with the Pasha Mitkhal, leader of the tribe, whom he describes as “a born aristocrat,” about forty, with a slender build and a small pointed black beard and mustache, who “wore no gorgeous robes nor special insignia of rank.” Except for a headcloth of finer texture and a muslin undergarment which he wore beneath his black camel hair cloak and his black headcoil of twisted horsehair, he dressed exactly as his warriors. Once Mitkhal was seated in his tent, Man-sour, his black attendant, “approached with a long-spouted brass coffee pot in his left hand, and two tiny cups without handles in the palm of his right.”
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On another occasion, Seabrook, observing a man accidentally overturn the large communal coffeepot, was surprised to hear the company exclaim,
“Khair Inshallah!,”
which means, “A good omen!” Mitkhal later explained that this old custom may have originated with a desire to help the klutz save face, although Seabrook speculated that it traces to pre-Moslem pagan libations in the sand.
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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:

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.

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.”
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“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;
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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 says 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.
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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.”
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