A Personal History of Coffee

About making and enjoying delicious coffee, especially for those who think they are too old to learn.

Do you want to love it? We all have coffee memories, whether we enjoy it or not. Photo by Nani Williams on Unsplash.

Almost everyone has a coffee journey, even if one cannot stand to drink it. The fascination began with watching adults huddle with steaming cups. They seemed oblivious to loud and misbehaving children all around. Some parents rewarded curiosity with sniffs of just-opened cans and steamy brews. Many recall revulsion at their first sip. Then came college all-nighters, and later, the moment when one drank one's first good cup of coffee. The Dictionary of the French Academy once declared that history is ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’. If this is true (alas, it isn’t), then remembering coffee encounters shows the beverage’s historical significance. Who remembers their first green beans, potatoes, or orange juice? For that matter, who can give a full narrative of their tea drinking? You get the point. Coffee, like Kinsella’s baseball, marks the years.

My earliest coffee memory comes from my maternal grandmother’s kitchen. Josephine was a little brunette German-American lady who loved her home. It was a good thing she did, having borne eleven children. She kept a clean house for my grandfather, Jess, a career staff sergeant, but the kitchen was the heart. Officers admired Josephine’s cooking. The gallant Edmund Gruber visited often during the years he ‘rolled along’ up the ranks. My mother remembered sitting on the piano bench as a young girl with Gruber. He played Stille Nacht while the adults passed around cigarettes and cups of my grandmother’s excellent coffee.

General Edmund Gruber (1879-1941) may have had his ancestor Franz’s musical talent. He wrote the ‘5th Artillery Regimental Song,’ which we know as ‘The Caissons Go Rolling Along.’ My mother once told me that John Philip Sousa was an ‘odious man.’ It seems Sousa had stolen some credit for “Caissons” without giving her hero, Gruber, proper credit (or royalties). Even worse, in the 1950s, the words and title were changed to ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along.’

My memories of grandma’s kitchen included a ubiquitous metal percolator. It was right next to a brace of jade-colored Fire King coffee cups and my grandpa’s bottle of Tabasco. Warmed by the aromatic steam of the percolator, I liked to stand with my elbows on the counter. I stared at the perking coffee squirting into the glass cap for what seemed like hours. I imagined it was playing the Maxwell House Coffee song.

The 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of percolators. My mother had a fashionable stovetop Corningware Cornflower coffee maker. She also had a clear Pyrex percolator, which later came into my possession. It seemed like the coffee was always on, although my Irish father never drank it. Dad preferred tea and took many opportunities to accuse the beverage as unhealthful. As a dentist, he had periodontal evidence against it that never quite convinced me. But the medical man usually concluded by saying, “it will stunt your growth!” I have to admit that this final argument made me uneasy, but lost its luster when I went away to college.

I also made a curious discovery in a kitchen cupboard as a child. Inside a couple of nested stock pots was a small octagonal aluminum object that I thought was a syrup dispenser. When I asked my mother what it was, she said, “oh, it’s a little percolator that the Italians use. Your Aunt Maria gave it to me.” My Italian Aunt Maria lived in Omaha. This Moka Pot was anything but a mere percolator.

After this first encounter, it took me more than thirty years to actually try the Moka Pot as a brewing method. Some day, I will argue for its virtues for daily use. I will do so by first recounting its history and then showing how to use the pot to make a delicious cup of coffee. Until then, svegliati e annusa il caffè!

A close shave: Two pandemic-inspired projects.

Closeness or Comfort? Old age makes this an easy decision. Photo by Supply on Unsplash.

The pandemic of 2020 was the last straw. It pushed me to do two things I have resisted doing. The first is to buy an electric shaver because I am giving up closeness for convenience. I could have given up and grown a beard (I still might). The second is to start this blog I call the Mossbunker Review.

When I was a young man, there were many things about my father and other older men that puzzled me. I found the solution to one of the greatest of those mysteries when I began to have wrinkles of my own. It is nothing profound. It has to do with why so many older men who are otherwise Luddites use Remingtons and Norelcos.

My father taught me how to shave using a double-edged safety razor (DESR). While one can still buy these steel instruments on Amazon, they look barbarous (no pun intended). They are no match for the sleek plastic razors now supplied by Harry’s or Gillette. The DESR made close shaving possible without a barber by encasing a disposable blade with two thin, sharp sides. The metal case protected the skin from all but the very edge. Armed with my DESR, a styptic pencil (for cuts), and a roll of toilet paper (also for wounds), my late adolescent years became easier. My post-shave face was soft as a baby’s bottom. Except for the cuts. But my father was not doing as he taught me. He was massaging his face with floating rotary heads. And while he shed less blood than me, his face was more like 0000 sandpaper than an infant’s bum. I began to think he was a wimp. No pain, no gain.

But I was wrong. I discovered my mistake when I passed fifty and began to get wrinkles and things like skin tags. I was never warned about the latter. I wielded my safety razor as one with five decades of experience, but my skill could not match the hazards of old age. Repeated strokes would not remove the growth from the corners of my mouth and the soul patch area under my lip. The little blond soldiers would not go down regardless of how hard I pressed. The area on my upper lip right against my nose was utterly unreachable. Even fresh razors ripped open the raised parts of my skin--without cutting the stubble.

No wonder my father, grandfather, uncles, and father-in-law all graduated to Norelco. I have fought a good fight, but now I am turning on the electricity. What’s that got to do with the decision to begin this blog? Not much. I have stories I have to tell. Being a perfectionist, I put off sharing them till I could make the telling soft as a baby’s bottom. But there were cuts and blood along the way. And other things to do. I read books about writing to avoid telling them, and I wrote pieces to please other people for the same reason. I also designed other websites and wrote half a dozen other sporadic weblogs.

So I am making a new beginning, again. I am turning on the electricity, and I hope the outcome will be as sharp as it once was. Thank you for witnessing my journey.

Long before praising a pig, E. B. White wrote a sonnet to a racehorse.

Some nag! Before earning fame as a porcine rescuer, Andy White made a few bob lauding a Derby winner. (Photo by Whitney Combs on Unsplash)

E. B. “Andy” White (1899-1985) was a renowned writer for The New Yorker magazine from the 1920s and into the 1980s. We know him as the author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Elements of Style. Andy graduated at the top of his class at Cornell in journalism, but could not land a job in New York in his field. So he bided his time tapping out poems, short stories, and letters on his Corona typewriter. Andy kept working, hoping that he could launch a career as a writer.

He finally found a job doing publicity work for the American Legion News Service in 1921 but hated the job. Never one to keep set hours, White felt that the situation did not give him time to develop as a writer with his own voice. He gave up PR when he realized that the best writers despised public relations workers. Professional writers thought of Publicity as an overpaid occupation. White saw that a career in PR caused one to lose his soul when the company forced him to spout the party line.

Early in 1922, White drew $400 out of savings and bought a Ford Model T roadster. He persuaded his friend, Cornell dropout Howard Cushman, to quit his dreary job in the city. White proposed the two make a road trip west--across the United States. Unable to afford travel, they decided to take their precious Corona typewriters instead. They would write stories and travelogues for their daily bread. If that failed, any odd job would do to secure the next sack of groceries and tank of gas.

I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it. - E. B. White

There was another difficulty that might not occur to us. The network of highways that we associate with modern American culture did not yet exist. There were no paved roads between Minneapolis and Spokane--a distance of 1400 miles. Seattle was the goal. They drove across the North Dakota prairie in wheel ruts some called a highway. The Ford ambled along, surrounded by tall grasses that obscured the driver’s side view. The most “developed” states had concrete roads that were more like one-lane sidewalks. When two automobiles encountered one another head-on, one had to yield. To allow the other car to pass meant pulling over to a dirt track that ran parallel to the paved road.

That they ever drove the prairie parkway is remarkable. The travelers ran out of funds regularly long before they made it to Minneapolis.

White and Cushman drove into Lexington, Kentucky, to fulfill a youthful longing. They thought one had not lived until one had bet on a horse race. They each had $2 to wager. Cushman’s safe strategy was to bet on the favorite. White was more intuitive and chose his horse based on his fondness for its name: Auntie Mae. A 12-1 underdog, the laconic and bedraggled Auntie Mae looked utterly out of place in the field. Andy’s long-shot somehow prevailed, while Howard’s didn’t even place. White won the enormous sum of $24.

White learned about the dangers of overweening beginner’s luck the hard way. He and Cushman decided to drive to Louisville and take in the 1922 Kentucky Derby. This time each invested six dollars using White’s fail-safe system. At the end of the day, White had sixty cents left, and Cushman lost the entire wad. What to do? Pull out the trusty Corona. White composed a sonnet in praise of Morvich, the winning horse that had broken their hearts. He drove straight to the office of the Louisville Herald and sold the sonnet to the editor for five dollars. The next morning Andy’s poem appeared on the front page. They had recouped their losses.

White sounded a triumphant note in a letter to his girlfriend, Alice. He wrote, “I now claim the distinction of being the only person that ever wrote a sonnet to a racehorse and got away with it.”