Happy New Year! As I'm still feeling in need of a boost after the Christmas break, I thought that coffee would be a good subject for my first blog post of the year.
Oxford was the location of the first coffee house in England. An establishment trading under the sign of the Angel opened in 1650, acting as a centre for gossip, news and academic discussions in equal measure. Coffee houses soon sprang up in London and elsewhere as their popularity grew. The heyday was the eighteenth century. In time, these establishments adapted to meet the requirements of their clientele. For instance, Lloyd’s Coffee House was a favourite haunt of merchants and sailors and so there, shipping information was shared and deals made. It is better known today as the insurer, Lloyd’s of London. The Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court just off Fleet Street catered for the Whigs while the nearby Rainbow attracted Freemasons and French refugee Huguenots. Slaughter’s (later Old Slaughter’s) establishment, on St Martin’s Lane, boasted an artistic clientele while the British Coffee House on Cockspur Street was popular with the Scots in London and privy to Jacobite plotting. Some, such as Moll King’s coffee-house in Covent Garden, catered for ‘lower’ tastes.
The Coffee House Orator, Edgar Bundy. Touchstones Rochdale.
So, how to make the perfect cup of Georgian-era coffee? Mrs Maria Eliza Rundell, in A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1808, gives a recipe.
Put two ounces of fresh ground coffee, of the best quality, into a coffee-pot, and pour eight coffee-cups of boiling water on it; let it boil six minutes, pour out a cupful two or three times, and return it again; then put two or three isinglass-chips into it, and pour one large spoonful of boiling water on it; boil it five minutes more, and set the pot by the fire to keep it hot for ten minutes, and you will have coffee of a beautiful clearness.
Fine cream should always be served with coffee, and either pounded sugar-candy, or fine Lisbon sugar.
If for foreigners, or those who like it extremely strong, make only eight dishes from three ounces. If not fresh roasted, ay it before a fire until perfectly hot and dry; or you may put the smallest bit of fresh butter into a preserving pan of a small size, and, when hot, throw the coffee in it, and toss it about until it be freshened, letting it be cold before ground.
Isinglass is a clarifying collagen produced from the swim bladders of fish. Nowadays we’d use gelatin. Lisbon sugar, otherwise known as clayed sugar, was manufactured in the colonies of France, Spain and, as the name suggests, Portugal. Wet pipe clay was laid on top of the sugar with water poured over to remove the molasses. Sugar candy is formed of large crystals of sugar, today known as rock candy.
Girl with a tray, Philippe Mercier, late 1740s. The State Hermitage Museum
Coffee, then as now, was a popular breakfast drink. Mrs Rundell also gives a recipe for the ideal breakfast coffee.
Coffee Milk
Boil a desert-spoonful of ground coffee, in nearly a pint of milk, a quarter of an hour; then put into it a shaving or two of isinglass, and clear it; let it boil a few minutes, and set it on the side of the fire to grow fine.
This is a very fine breakfast; it should be sweetened with real Lisbon sugar of a good quality.
The Lavergne Family Breakfast by Jean-Étienne Liotard. The National Gallery, London.
While tea was often drunk from a dish (or saucer), coffee was usually – but not exclusively – drunk from cups with or without handles (often referred to as a coffee can). Saucers of the time were deeper than those we use today. When coffee was tipped from the cup into the saucer, it cooled the drink more quickly.
The Woman Taking Coffee by Louis Marin Bonnet, 1774. © President and Fellows of Harvard College
An advert for a sale of chinaware in 1750 suggests that handled coffee cups were sold without saucers and that those with saucers were predominantly intended for breakfast.
A neat assortment of CHINA WARE, consisting of Table and Tea Table China, Soup Dishes, Fruit or Salad ditto, Bowls of all Sizes, Tea Pots, Milk Pots, Spoon Boats, Variety of Tea Cups and Saucers, Handled Coffee Cups, Coffees and Saucers, or Breakfast Cups, Chocolates and Saucers, Water Plates, Bread and Butter, or Breakfast ditto, Quart and Pint Mugs, Coffee Pots, Sauce Boats; with several other Pieces too tedious to mention.
(Newcastle Courant, 28 July 1750)
During the 1770s, advertisements appeared for English coffee made to a balsamic recipe from herbs, barks and plants which extolled a myriad of health benefits. A typical letter of fawning recommendation, published in regional newspapers alongside information on stockists, described the grateful customer as previously suffering from headaches, drowsiness, trembling, belching, wandering pains across the body, loss of appetite, and more. A cup of this magical coffee in the morning and evening instantly banished all the complaints. (It was perhaps akin to dandelion coffee, a known coffee substitute.)
In the UK, towards the end of the eighteenth century, coffee declined somewhat in popularity, losing out to tea which was cheaper and simpler to make.
This is a revised version of my earlier blog post on a former website.
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