The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee: A History of the World According to Coffee - Softcover

Allen, Stewart Lee

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1641290102 ISBN 13: 9781641290104

Publisher: Soho Press, 2018

Synopsis

"Absolutely riveting . . . Essential reading for foodies, java-junkies, anthropologists, and anyone else interested in funny, sardonically told adventure stories."
—Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential


Full of humor and historical insights, The Devil’s Cup is not only ahistory of coffee, but a travelogue of a risk-taking brew-seeker.

In this captivating book, Stewart Lee Allen treks three-quarters of the way around the world on a caffeinated quest to answer these profound questions: Did the advent of coffee give birth to an enlightened western civilization? Is coffee the substance that drives history? From the cliffhanging villages of Southern Yemen, where coffee beans were first cultivated eight hundred years ago, to a cavernous coffeehouse in Calcutta, the drinking spot for two of India’s Nobel Prize winners . . . from Parisian salons and cafés where the French Revolution was born, to the roadside diners and chain restaurants of the good ol’ USA, where something resembling brown water passes for coffee, Allen wittily proves that the world was wired long before the Internet. And those who deny the power of coffee (namely tea drinkers) do so at their own peril.

About this title

About the Author

Stewart Lee Allen's books on how food and drink shape human society have been translated into fifteen languages. He currently lives in Manhattan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
A Season in Hell
 
Harrar, Ethiopia
 
“You like ram-bo?”
      My questioner was a wiry Arab-African squatting in the shade of a white clay wall. Sharp eyes, wispy mustache, white turban. Not your typical Sylvester Stallone fan.
      “Rambo?” I repeated uncertainly.
      He nodded. “Ram-bo.” He adjusted his filthy wraparound so the hem didn’t drag in the dirt. “Ram-bo,” he repeated with infinite disinterest. “Farangi.”
      “Are you really a Rambo fan?” I was surprised—Charles Bronson had been more popular in Calcutta. I flexed my biceps to clarify. “You like?”
      The man looked at me in disgust. “Ram-bo,” he insisted. “Ramboo, Ram-boooo. You go? You like?”
      “No go,” I said, walking off. “No like.”
      I’d just arrived in Harrar, a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands, after a grueling twenty-four hour train journey from the capital, Addis Ababa. I already preferred Harrar. Its winding alleys were free of both cars and thieves, a big improvement over Addis, where pickpockets followed me like flies and my one night out had ended in an attempted robbery after a “friendship coffee ceremony.” I also liked Harrar’s Arabic flavor, the whitewashed mud buildings, and the colorful gypsy-African clothes worn by the girls. Rambo Man had been the only hustler so far, and he seemed reasonable enough.
      I found a suitable cafe and grabbed a table in the shade. The coffee, brewed on an old hand-pulled espresso machine, was a thick black liquor served in a shot glass. The taste was shocking in the intensity of its “coffeeness,” a trait I attributed to minor burns incurred in the pan-roasting technique common in Ethiopia. Harrarian coffee beans are among the world’s finest, second only to Jamaican and Yemeni, but this . . . I suspected local beans had been mixed with smuggled Zairean Robusta, which would account for the fine head of crema (called wesh here), as well as the fact that after one cup I felt like crawling out of my skin.
      I ordered a second. Rambo Man had come to stare at me from across the road. Our eyes met. He shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands suggestively. I scowled.
      Harrar is one of the legendary cities of African antiquity. It was closed to foreigners for centuries because an Islamic saint had prophesied its fall the day a non-Muslim entered the walls. Christians who attempted to enter were beheaded; African merchants were merely locked outside and left to the tender mercies of local lion packs. Not that inside was much better. Hyenas roamed the streets, noshing on the homeless. Witchcraft and slavery flourished, particularly the notorious selling of black eunuchs to Turkish harems. By the 1800s, the walled city had become so isolated that a separate language had developed. It is still spoken today.
      This reputation drew Europe’s most intrepid adventurers to Harrar. Many tried, many died, until Sir Richard Burton, the Englishman who “discovered” the source of the Nile, managed to enter the city in 1855 disguised as an Arab. It fell soon afterward.
      The most intriguing of Harrar’s early Western visitors, however, was the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud had come to Paris when he was seventeen. After a year of pursuing his famous “derangement of the senses” lifestyle, he’d established a reputation as the most depraved man in the city. By nineteen, he’d finished his masterpiece, A Season in Hell. Having reached his twentieth year, he renounced all poetry and disappeared off the face of the earth. Rimbaud . . .
      “Rambo!” I shouted, jumping out of my chair. That’s what the fellow had been going on about—Rimbaud, pronounced “Rambo.” He’d wanted to take me to Rimbaud’s mansion. The poet had not “disappeared off the face of the earth” when he’d abandoned poetry in 1870. He’d merely come to his senses and become a coffee merchant in Harrar.
      Rambo Man, however, had vanished.
      Rimbaud’s reason for coming to Ethiopia was more complicated than a desire to enter the coffee trade. He was actually fulfilling a passage from A Season in Hell, in which he predicted going to a land “of lost climates” from which he would return “with limbs of iron, bronzed skin, and fierce eyes.” He wanted action, danger, and money. He got at least the first two in Harrar. The emir had been deposed only twenty years earlier, and tensions were still high. The French coffee merchants needed someone crazy enough to risk his life for a bean (albeit one going for one hundred dollars a pound). Rimbaud was their man.
      The importance of the Harrar Longberry, however, goes beyond the fragrant cup it produces. Many believe it is here that the lowly Robusta bean evolved into the civilized Arabica, potentially making the Harrar Longberry the missing link of the genus Coffea. To understand the importance of this you must first know that there are two basic species of coffee beans: the luscious Arabica from East Africa, which prefers higher elevations, and the reviled
Robusta from Zaire, which grows just about anywhere.
      That being understood, we must now go back to that mysterious time before the dawn of civilization, the Precaffeinated Era.
      Back then, fifteen hundred to three thousand years ago, the world’s first coffee lovers, the nomadic Oromos, lived in the kingdom of Kefa.1 The Oromos didn’t actually drink coffee; they ate it, crushed, mixed with fat, and shaped into golf-ball-size treats. They were especially fond of munching on these coffee-balls before going into battle against the people of Bonga, who generally beat the pants off the Oromos. The Bongas also happened to be firstrate slave traders, and sent about seven thousand slaves each year to the Arabic markets in Harrar. A fair number of these unfortunates were Oromos coffee chewers who had been captured in battle. It was these people who accidentally first brought the bean to Harrar. Ethiopian rangers say the old slave trails are still shaded by the coffee trees that have grown from their discarded meals.
      But the important thing is the difference between the regions’ plants. Beans from relatively low-lying Kefa grow in huge coffee jungles and are generally more akin to the squat, harsh Robustas that probably came out of the jungles of Zaire thousands of years before. Harrar’s beans, by contrast, are long-bodied and possess delicious personalities like the Arabicas. In adapting to Harrar’s higher altitude, something wonderful seems to have happened to them. No one knows what, but we should all be grateful that it was the evolved Arabica beans of Harrar that were later brought to Yemen, and then to the world at large.
      So Rimbaud’s risking his life for the bean (in fact, it killed him) is perhaps not so unreasonable. It’s worth noting, however, that the poet/merchant did not seem to hold Harrar’s coffee in high regard. “Horrible” is how he describes it in one letter; “awful stuff” and “disgusting.” Oh well. Perhaps all those years of absinthe had dulled his taste buds. The fact that the locals were fond of selling him beans laced with goat shit probably didn’t help matters.
      After a few more cups, I checked into a hotel and set out in search of Rimbaud’s home. Harrar is a small place of about twenty thousand inhabitants; a maze of alleys lined with lopsided mosques, mud huts. It is noticeably lacking in street names. Rimbaud’s house is probably the easiest thing to find in the city, since any foreigner who approaches is mobbed by wannabe tour guides. I had no intention of paying anybody for guiding me to a house, and eventually, by taking the most obscure route imaginable, I managed to reach what I knew was Rimbaud’s neighborhood undetected, only to find myself in a dead-end alley.
      There was nobody in sight, so I yelled a cautious hello.
      “Here,” came a familiar voice.
      I crawled through a jagged crack in one of the walls, and there, squatting on a pile of rubble, was Rambo Man.
      “Aha!” he shouted. “You have come at last.”
      He was sitting in front of one of the oddest houses I’d ever seen. At least it seemed so in the context of Harrar’s one-story mud huts. It was three stories high with twin peaked gables, all covered in elaborate carvings. The shingled roof was fringed with fleur-de-lis decorations and the windows were stained red. Straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, I thought. The oddest thing, though, was how the mansion was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high mud wall with no opening other than the crack that I’d just crawled through.
      The man was looking at me in surprise. “You have no guide?”
      “Guide? What for?”
      “No problem.” He waved a yellow piece of paper at me and demanded ten birra.
      “What are these?” I asked.
      “Tickets.”
      “Tickets? Are they real?”
      “See them.” He seemed vaguely offended. Ticket—Rimbaud, said the piece of paper. 10 Br. “You see—real house. Government. Not like the others.”
      “You mean there are other Rimbaud houses?”
      “No. Only one.”
      I paid him, and he led me up a narrow interior stairway into a huge chamber, perhaps three thousand square feet, with a fifty-foot-high ceiling ringed by an old-fashioned oval balcony. The walls were covered in handpainted canvas “wallpaper,” now so filthy and tattered that I could barely make out the quaint Parisian garden scenes and heraldic devices. Huge dust particles floated about. There was no furniture of any kind.
      The great French poet spent the last days of his life in this surreal chateau, alone except for his beloved manservant. He wrote no poetry, and his letters were filled with complaints of loneliness, disease, and his financial problems, including a disastrous attempt to sell slaves and guns to the Ethiopian emperor. His prophecy of coming home with “limbs of iron . . . and fierce eyes” proved false. He returned to France delirious and destitute. His left leg had been amputated. A mysterious infection soon killed him.
      I wandered about for a while, peering over the balcony, touching the walls. The place seemed uninhabited. A boy in rags trailed after me only to flee as soon as I spoke. Pigeons cooed from nests among the tattered wall hangings.
      As I left, the man asked me if I wanted to meet Rimbaud’s descendants.
      “There were daughters,” he said. “Rimbaud’s daughters . . .”
      “Rimbaud had children?” I asked.
      “Many daughters. Very beautiful girls . . . so young . . .” he stopped, suggestively. “You want Rambo girl?”
      To sleep with the bastard offspring of Arthur Rimbaud, I thought; that would be a story. She would be beautiful, as all the women here were, and perfectly arrogant, as behooved one of Ethiopian-French descent. It was tempting. But hadn’t it been a case of Harrarian clap that killed Rimbaud? I declined.
 
Don’t roast your coffee beans in the marketplace.
(Don’t tell secrets to strangers.)
Oromo nomad saying
 
I met Abera Teshone while looking for the hyena men, a caste that feeds Harrar’s trash to the packs of hyenas that gather nightly outside the city walls. The caste started as a way of keeping the animals from entering the city and attacking humans. Today it’s largely a tourist attraction, although the sight of hideous animals accepting garbage from men in rags is not likely to topple the Disney empire.
      Abera, a young man with a withered left leg, had been my guide for the event, and afterward we’d gone for a beer. He wanted to know why I had come to Harrar.
      “Not many tourists come here,” he explained.
      “I noticed. I came here to learn about coffee.” A thought struck me. “Hey, didn’t you say you were an agriculture student? What do you know about its origin?”
      “Do you know the story about Kaldi and the dancing goats?”
      “Of course,” I said. It’s one of coffee’s mythological chestnuts. It goes like this:
 
An Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi one day noticed his best goat dancing about and baaing like a maniac. It seemed to happen after the old billy goat had been nibbling the berries off a certain plant. The goatherd tried a few himself and soon was dancing about, too.
      A holy man wandered by and asked the boy why he was dancing with a goat. The goatherd explained. The monk took some berries home and found that after eating them he could not sleep. It so happened that this holy man was famous for his rather tedious all-night sermons and was having trouble keeping his disciples awake. So he immediately ordered all his disciples, called dervishes, to chew the bean before he preached. The dervishes’ sleepiness vanished, and word spread about the great prophet whose electrifying wisdom kept you awake until dawn.
      Being a city boy, I mentioned to Abera that it seemed strange that the goats would eat berries. Didn’t they normally prefer leafy stuff?
      “Yes, well, perhaps it was so,” he said. “That is how the country folk still make it.”
      “They make coffee out of leaves?”
      “Yes. They call it kati.”
      “Really? I would like to try it. Maybe in a café . . .”
      “Oh no,” he laughed. “This is only drunk in the home. Hardly anyone in Harrar drinks it today. You must visit the Ogaden. They still drink it.”
      “Where do they live?”
      “The Ogaden? They live now in Jiga-Jiga.” He made the place sound like a disease. “But you can’t go there. It’s very, very dangerous. And those Somalis, those Ogaden, are very arrogant. So rude!”
      “Why? What is the problem?”
      “They are rude people!” Abera shook his head angrily at the Ogaden’s poo...

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1641290102
• ISBN 13: 9781641290104
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240