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Monday, 27 August 2007 Coffee. I have it every morning; in America, is the universal breakfast drink. It accompanies or follows a midday meal and dinner; may be had between meals in the proverbial coffee break mid-morning, mid-afternoon, or long after dinner. Coffee is for perking one up. My body says: "I'm getting sleepy; I need a strong cup of coffee." I think of the process - the press method - by which I sometimes brew coffee. The liquid, cleared of sediment, is nevertheless colored; substantially 'coffee.' Though, coffee-colored has come to mean coffee-and-cream colored. Coffee may be black, still 'black' is somehow not descriptive of 'coffee.'
Why is it I drink coffee black? I've never been fond of the Brit way of drinking coffee (and tea) with milk in it. Coffee is almost as popular in Britain as it is in the United States. But in the UK, most people seem to think instant coffee is perfectly acceptable to drink... which tells you everything you need to know about the role of coffee in this country and why I found myself running to Starbucks. Most Brits drink their coffee with milk (cream is an American convention) and sugar. Still. I drink it black, which thoroughly announced me as “American” (or denounced me as “colonial”). During my first encounter of making coffee and tea, known better as “brewing up,” I told them I take my coffee and tea black. Why contaminate a good thing with milk and sugar? They stared at me for a bit, confused. My colleagues promptly informed me in England you typically have your coffee with milk (and if you want, one or two sugars). Surprisingly, U.K. tea sales have declined 12 percent in the past five years. It seems Brits' taste for tea has waned as their taste for (properly?) brewed coffee has grown. This is a momentous shift. Just as coffee in America is an everyday drink, Brits don't just drink tea for breakfast. They drink it before, during, after and in between meals. After all, tea has been a British staple since the 1600s; by the late 18th century, tea had become so closely associated with British colonialism that Bostonians grabbed tea chests and threw them into the harbor to protest British taxes, helping spark the American Revolution.
I think too, of my grandparents and even further back, long ago to the pioneers, in rough covered wagons who broke through the prairie. Recalling our pioneer and working class past, I imagine we drink black coffee because “back in the day” those able-bodied men and women were more frugal in a no-nonsense, pragmatic way. They brewed “cowboy coffee,” made without extraneous devices, filters, or tools, simply by heating coarse grounds with water in a pot, and letting the grounds settle before pouring off the liquid to drink. The name suggests this method was employed by those pioneers and cowboys, on the trail and around the nightly campfire.
Or the “(café) Americano.” The style of coffee prepared by adding espresso to hot water, giving a similar strength but different flavor than regular drip coffee. Most drinkers prefer it black and unsweetened to fully appreciate the differences in taste from regular coffee. Intended originally as an insult, those American Allies in Italy during the World War II, unaware of or unfazed by the derogatory nature of the name, wanted their espresso diluted, which local baristas tried to emulate for them.
Perhaps they searched for the cup of joe they had learned to drink back home because it was all they knew, it was the coffee their pioneer ancestors before them had grown accustomed to. If I want cream and sugar then I will drink a malt(ed milkshake). I like the taste of a good coffee or tea by itself anyways. Milk (or cream) tastes awful in tea. Plus it has more dietary advantages if taken black. Milk and sugar have currently (as I suppose they have always) been hot topic when it comes to health and weight loss. In fact a new study has shown that when milk is consumed with tea - the effect of the catechins (the compounds that play a role in preventing cancer and heart disease) is effectively canceled out. "If you want to drink tea to have the beneficial health effects you have to drink it without milk. That is clearly shown by our experiments," [...] Black tea significantly improved blood flow compared to drinking water but adding milk blunted the effect of the tea. Despite all of this, I remember many recent instances, of standing in the kitchen, pouring cream into my coffee, and in that moment, I realized I had become another person. Thursday, 9 August 2007 Here are some of the pictures of what I have been doing all summer. They go back all the way to when Chris' visited me in Manchester and our trip down to London, pictures from my weekend in Houston for my cousin's wedding, and my on-a-whim trip to Door County, on the last-minute 'advice' from Alyssa. I have been meaning to post these events to let people know I haven't fallen off the face of the world. I will hopefully annotate these soon, but with the wedding tomorrow and the rehersal tonight, it might not happen until next week. But since I have lots to tell everyone I will attempt to finish it sooner than later (I'm attempting to live by a new policy of non-procrastination, or at the very least a shift from passive experiencing and intaking to active, more rigorous, engagement. Yea, I'll probably always be a procrastinator.) |
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