Uncommon Grounds by Mark
Pendergrast, 1999, Excerpts
Europeans took to coffee with a passion. In the first half
of the seventeenth century, coffee was still an exotic beverage, and like other
such rare substances as sugar, cocoa, and tea, initially was used primarily as
an expensive medicine by the upper classes. Over the next fifty years, however,
Europeans were to discover the social as well as medicinal benefits of the
Arabian drink.
In 1710, rather than boiling coffee, the French first made
it the infusion method, with powdered coffee suspended in a cloth bag over
which boiling water was poured. Coffee arrived in Vienna a bit later than in
France. In the 1700s, coffee practically fueled the intellectual life of the
city.
Nowhere did coffee have such a dynamic and immediate impact
as in England. Coffee and coffeehouses took London by storm. Like a liquid
torrent the coffee rage drenched England, beginning at Oxford University in
1650, where Jacobs, a Lebanese Jew, opened the first coffeehouse.
By 1700 there were more than two thousand London
coffeehouses, occupying more premises and paying more rent than any other
trade. They came to be known as ‘penny universities,’ because for that price
one could purchase a cup of coffee and sit for hours listening to extraordinary
conversations. Each coffeehouse specialized in a different type of clientele. In
one, physicians could be consulted. Others served Protestants, Puritans,
Catholics, Jews, literati, merchants, traders, fops, Whigs Tories, army
officers, actors, lawyers, clergy, or wits. The coffeehouses provided England’s
first egalitarian meeting place, where a man was expected to chat with his
tablemates whether he knew them or not.
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