Mountains from Molehills

Note from the author: All characters in this article are imaginary. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is strictly accidental.


It has been reported in a magazine advertisement that the battle of Waterloo was lost to Napoleon because he had eaten a green peach and suffered from a stomachache at the time. Possibly, it was a plum, but it doesn’t matter too much. Fruit was cheap in those days, and the point is, it just wasn’t worth it. If this proves anything at all, it is that Napoleon was as easily influenced by trivia as the rest of us.

Back in the sixteenth century, the English used to send ships to North America to bring back sassafras bark. The survival ration of the sailors was considerably less than that for a modern astronaut, but England was short of sassafras bark so there were always plenty of volunteers. Of course, the voyage of Christopher Columbus was just as urgent. He was looking for spice. A more cautious man might have spent the money on research to develop a tin can. Columbus liked excitement. Even though he missed his goal by a hundred and eighty degrees of longitude, we must admire his spirit. He tried.
Most of us are broad minded about the right of others to have little idiosyncrasies. If someone wants to spoil a good cup of tea by adding milk to it, let them do it, as long as they drink it. We don’t mind at all, if someone insists on having sugar in their coffee. We realize that everyone can’t be a connoisseur. We value our right to disagree on matters of importance. We inherit this trait from our nation’s forefathers. Taxation without representation was discussed calmly enough. The first open act of violence in the American Revolution, quite naturally was prompted by the tax on tea.

One of our most important assets is coffee. The history of the coffee house is long and honorable. Without the aid of a single folk singer, they were doing a good business in the days of Shakespeare and [Ben] Jonson. That highly respected institution Lloyd’s of London, as anyone knows, started as a coffee house. Here, the men who underwrote marine insurance gathered to transact their business. It solved the problem of their overhead cost. It also solved the problem of the coffee break.

Sometime in the seventeenth century, we find a Londoner complaining to his diary about the difficulty of getting a good cup of coffee. He charges the coffee merchant with diluting his product with chicory. Now there is nothing wrong with chicory as a drink of course but a basic must for mixed drinks is that they be alcoholic. We all know that coffee is to be real coffee, must be pure coffee. We can expect the worst of a man who would mix chicory and coffee. It will then come as no surprise to you to hear that the chicory he bought was colored with Venetian red to make it nearer the color of coffee. The man who sold him the Venetian red was also dishonest. He was adding brick dust to his product.

One chilly fall evening in the colonial days of our country, a weary traveler stopped at a wayside inn for a night’s rest. When he was seated comfortably in front of the fireplace, his host came in to see if anything further could be done for his comfort. The traveler said, “Yes, do you have any chicory?” the landlord admitted he had. “Good,” said his guest, “would you bring it here please?” His host dutifully went to the kitchen and returned with the box in which he kept his chicory supply. “Set it there please,” said the traveler, nodding toward the table. When the landlord had done as he asked, he continued, “Now, go brew me a cup of coffee.”

It was not everyone who had the wit to get a good cup of coffee in this manner. There were those people who felt the best method was to carry a portable coffee grinder about with them and demand coffee beans. They could then grind and brew their own the more imaginative, however, felt that the legal approach was the only civilized way to handle the problem.

“No vendor of coffee may adulterate his product with any substance whatsoever unless he declare to the purchaser of said coffee the nature of the adulterating substance and the percentage of such adulteration.”

There were, of course, suitably severe penalties for any infractions. Only a person who lives close to the land of the wooden nutmeg would be cynical of the results. Sad to relate the sneer was justified. The coffee merchant kept up his trade with the seller of chicory who continued to color it with Venetian red diluted with brick dust. This mixture was then ground very fine, moistened slightly, and pressed into a mold just the shape of a coffee bean. This took care of the character who was lugging around a coffee mill. As for the legal angle he could feel quite righteous. He was not selling adulterated coffee. Coffee was the one thing he had left out.