Subject: Re: Coffee

From: [email-masked] (Jack Campin)
Date: 14 May 93 13:27:29 GMT

[email-masked] (Pat Churchill) wrote:
> Reay Tannahill in *Food and History* says coffee originated in Ethiopia.
> I forget the details but I can check.  She has some interesting stuff
> about coffee reaching Europe and England and the advent of *coffee houses*
> which evolved in England as gentlemen's clubs (people started going there
> to drink the new miracle beverage but ended up continuing to go there for
> the company) while in places like France they became cafes.

There is an interesting description of the first few months after coffee
arrived in Istanbul from its Arabian homeland (during the reign of Suleyman
the Magnificent, I think) in a book called "Istanbul and the Civilization
of the Ottoman Empire" (I forget the author).  The same pattern of initial
craze and moral panic occurred here as it did in Western Europe; there was
a great deal of concern about its stimulant and also its anaphrodisiac
properties (and given the way the Ottoman court worked, the latter seems a
very odd thing for them to be worrying about).  The panic took on the
specific form of a religious concern about whether roasted beans counted as
a burned food, and as such unclean.  The religious court was called in by
the Just Say No faction to settle the matter, but by the time they reached
their decision it was clear that only one answer would be acceptable to the
people of the city; the ulama bowed to caffeine-fuelled public opinion and
decided that bean roasting was just a form of cooking.

As in France, coffee seems to have become institutionalized as cafes rather
than clubs.  I assume this was because both France and the Ottoman Empire
were highly centralized states with no significant bourgeoisie needing
private places to network.  Also, the Turkish coffeehouse developed in the
Islamic culture of public space, which (palace apart) does not divide up
areas of city by social class; was France like that at the time?  There's
certainly more class heterogeneity in a typical French cafe nowadays than
in any similar public space in Britain (and of course no British person
would even think of a gentleman's club as a public space at all).

-- 
-- Jack Campin -- Room 1.36, Department of Computing & Electrical Engineering,
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From: [email-masked] (David D Auerbach)
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 15:24:45 GMT

I thought that the religious reasons in Islamic countries were an excuse
for the deeper religious reasons of preferring the congregation to spend
their time in worship and not hanging out in coffeeshops socializing, and
perhaps plotting. Certainly in Europe, (I'll dig up a British quote on
this soon) the government was explicit about the seditious nature of
coffee houses and stunted their growth in the early days.

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From: [email-masked] (David Friedman)
Date: Wed, 19 May 1993 18:54:13 GMT

Another good book on the early history of coffee in the Islamic World is:

Ralph Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses, The Origins of a Social Beverage in
the Medieval Near East, U of Washington Press, Seattle (1985).

David Friedman