coffee – Don't hold your breath

The perfect coffee

Looking for a good coffee, I wandered into a dark but welcoming cafe. A long menu, with coffee from many different places in the world. If I’d seen a menu like this in any other country in the world I would have turned to The Family and said “We are in a den of coffee snobs.” But not in Japan. We ordered our coffees and caramel custard (always a favourite with The Family) and settled down to absorb the atmosphere of the place. There was an old man reading a newspaper next to me: his sips of coffee kept perfect pace with his reading of the newspaper, so he finished the two together, folded the paper, waved goodbye to the man behind the counter, and left. There were other regulars, and a smattering of people who’d just found a good place.

I recognized the place although I’d never been there before. Japan has enthusiasts running little shops, bars, and restaurants. More than a decade ago, I’d discovered a little whisky bar in a basement near my hotel in Kyoto. The man running it had an excellent collection of whisky, and an equally good collection of classic jazz LPs. I had lovely conversations with him for the month I was there, and he didn’t seem to worry that his bar was not more popular than it was. When our coffee was ready I found it was very good. The owner handed them to us with a smile and returned to his conversation with two regulars. There’s something in the culture which does not discourage people from following their interests, and it shows up in excellent little places like this. I cherish every one I find: the whisky, the coffee, the rice crackers, the sushi, the paper seller.

Sweet Sicily

One day The Family woke up and told me “We are walking enough all day to burn off any calories that we may take in these Sicilian sweets.” Our evenings changed after that. We continued to eat all the sweets and coffee that we had before, but now without the sense of guilt and impending catastrophe.

Traditional cassata at the monastery bakery in Palermo

A filled pastry and an almond and pistachio cassata at the monastery bakery in Palermo

From this period of our trip through Sicily I remember three wonderful pasticeria. One was inside the monastery of Santa Caterina in Palermo. This was a rather traditional sweet shop which said it made very traditional recipes. We got a traditional cassata from them, topped with fruits, a biscuit filled with traditional ricotta cream, and a new-fangled pistachio and almond cassata along with the coffee. The Family asked “Why did you order a third thing?” “We’ve walked more than usual today,” I told her.

The previous day we’d taken the bus to Monreale, walked up the steep hill, walked through a monastery and a church, and climbed many steps. We deserved a sweet immediately after lunch. Right outside the cathedral was a busy gelateria. One display had what you see in the photo above. A cannoli right after lunch? Why not? And a lage bread with ricotta cream piped into it. Nothing that a ristretto can’t put right.

The third of the trio of wonderful pasticeria was Maria Grammatico’s in Erice. It’s so famous that several Sicilians told us to go there when they heard we were going to Erice. We sat with a plate of biscuits (see the featured photo) and coffee in the afternoon, resting our feet. The queue at the counter was long, but fortunately we’d been through it already. Later, at a less busy moment, I took a photo of the sweets on display. As a friend summarized later, “Sicily is famous for wonderful but somewhat heavy sweets.”

Bhutanese Coffee

As we drew out of Paro for our long drive down to the plains I asked Tashi whether we could have a coffee before we hit the highway. He was a little apologetic about not taking us to the best ice cream shop in the town, so he said he would stop at the best coffee shop in Bhutan. No one wanted to pass up this opportunity, and even a detached soul like The Family decided she wanted a cappuccino. As we ordered at the bar I looked around and saw a gleaming machine in its own glass cage at one side of the cafe. The doors were closed and two men were looking intently at some beans. A coffee roaster! This place seemed to know what it was up to.

The two masters came to an agreement and took the beans out from the tray, and opened the door to the roastery. I slipped in to take a photo, not neglecting to take deep breaths filled with the aroma of a mellow roast. One of the masters came back and explained what was special about the cafe. They have a coffee farm in the lower slopes near the border and bring the beans up to Paro to roast. He was very proud of being able to match the roasting to the climate the beans had seen while developing. He spoke briefly to the barista about the coffee that I’d ordered and told me that I should let him know how I liked it.

I did like it a lot. I’m not the kind of connoisseur who can tell the terroir from the taste of the espresso, but it was certainly roasted and prepared very well. I liked the mild aroma that the man was very proud of and I told him so. The Family also declared herself very satisfied with her cappuccino. We thanked the barista, the roaster, and Tashi for a wonderful end to our long trip through Bhutan.

The elements of civilization

Old and outdated ideas can be given a new lease of life in pop culture. The notion of the Norse god of thunder being a superhero on par with Spiderman, and Valhalla being as real as the arachnohominid’s New York is an example. (And there I put together words from two dead languages using a construction from a modern language!) If Norse mythology can be dragged into the 21st century, then why not the ancient mistakes about the nature of matter? But wait what really matters to most of us is not chemistry, but the texture of our lives. So here’s my version of the five elements, the ones that make up modern civilization.

The first, and the one illustrated by the featured photo, is of plenty for a few. The fall of the evil empire at the end of the previous century gave us a new world, one in which we all freely love and embrace the notion that the word trillionaire is natural. It also means that we earn money mainly so that we give it to the few people who are described by that adjective turned noun.

The next has to be tangles. To live in the modern world is to deal with conflicting demands on us from work and family, or from driving and traffic. Having a smart phone in order to ease some of these tensions then leads to spam calls. Keeping in touch with friends conflicts with the rabbit holes into which social media algorithms lure you when you least have time.

Then there are crowds. Is there a part of modern life which does not involve crowds? Civilized life requires us to deal with crowds by developing the social skills of ignoring others: the averted glance while walking, the deep concentration on your phone when you are in public transport, the deliberate ignoring of conversation around you as you work in your wonderful airy open-plan office, the shouted conversations with your mates in a bar packed with others with their mates, and so on.

One cannot forget climate change, that rattle and clatter that you always hear at your back: the hot summers, the warm winters with sudden heavy snow, the hurricanes or bumpy flights. The constant humidity in the air or the clear and present danger of forest fires or floods are other symptoms.

The fifth element is coffee and chocolate cake, or other indulgences to make you forget the first four elements of your life. In another time this was called navel gazing or burying your head in the sand. Today it is the little bit of joy that you can squeeze out of living in a civilized world.

South Indian filter coffee

South Indian coffee is one of my favourites. As every interested person knows, coffee was first grown in Ethiopia, and traded by the Arabs as a luxury. Its manufacture was very strictly controlled. There is a legend that a Sufi preacher, Baba Budan, made a journey to Mecca and smuggled a few beans back to India. He planted them in the hills of Chikmagalur in Karnataka, from which coffee spread in India. Whether or not this story is apocryphal doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that there is a long tradition of making coffee with milk in the south of India. A decoction is prepared in a hard packed filter filled with cold water and allowed to drip overnight. The decoction is never put directly to heat; instead it is poured into hot milk. I ask for my coffee without sugar. The burning hot liquid comes in the little brass mug that you see above. You pour it into the larger mug a little at a time so that it cools faster and can be drunk easily. You take your time pouring the liquid from one cup to another to cool it. All this slow action gives you time for conversations over coffee. I think that’s a nice civilized way to have your morning’s cup.

Starting again

I wandered out to do a few overdue chores, protected by a mask and face shield. Afterwards I decided to pay a visit to my usual pre-pandemic haunts. Downtown, between Flora Fountain and the stock exchange, crowds were thin. The bakery I like has been open for a while, and I got all the little things I missed for months; a few pavs, a brun, and a loaf of German bread. The pav is a Mumbai special, fluffy sourdough buns, with a hard crust, probably adapted from a Portuguese ancestral bread. Someone must have written a thesis on its origin, and I would love to read it. The other typically Mumbai bread, the brun, is even more crusty, and is slowly becoming extinct. I love it the old fashioned way: sliced open, slathered with butter, then cut into smaller pieces to savour with tea. I walked into a chain cafe (featured photo). They had removed their tables; everything was to go only. I got my double shot of espresso, and came out on the deserted road to have it.

Life has to start again. But for the first time in five months the disease seemed much closer to us; a couple we know well have tested positive. A dependable survey in Mumbai found that the epidemic has not yet touched more than half the population. That means if we drop all safeguards, the disease will begin to burn through the city again. As yet there is no clear way of managing the disease if it turns critical, and no vaccine. Even after you recover, it may require months of rehabilitation. We don’t even know whether immunity lasts a full year. I guess The Family and I, like most of us, will grope and search for a safe way to socialize in the coming months.

Eritrean coffee

Since Kenya grows its own coffee, I would finish a meal with coffee without giving the order much thought. I should have paid more attention when I ordered one in an Eritrean place. After all Eritrea or Ethiopia are the place where coffee was first domesticated, and it stands to reason that serving coffee will be an elaborate tradition. It caught me by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. This being a restaurant, the initial process of roasting and grinding was done before the coffee came to the table. My first inkling that this would be different when a procession of three people approached the table. One put the cup and sugar bowl in front of me, and another arranged a serving table. The woman then spooned the coffee ground into a little earthen pot, filled it with water and heated it on a flame.

As she poured the coffee into the cup I could get the aroma of good Eritrean coffee wafting from the stream of brown liquid. I admired the elegant earthenware pot, the ebena, from which the coffee was being served. The service ended with an incense holder being placed on the table. My saucer had a little biscuit on it; I later realized that the traditional accompaniment, the himbasha, is not very different. I tasted the coffee, very aromatic and not as bitter as an espresso roast would make it. No sugar was needed, although adding sugar is said to be traditional. I declined a refill, although tradition would have demanded two refills. A nice ceremonial coffee can really round off a trip to Kenya.

Turkish Coffee

I’d got to like the Turkish çay (pronounced chai) so much that I neglected the coffee for the first half of the trip. In Şirince it was impossible to neglect the coffee. Most of the restaurants in the village had tables with the beautiful pattered trays set out with the cups that you see in the featured photo. Some time in the afternoon we decided to sit down at one of these and have a coffee.

I looked inside the restaurant. A couple of old men sat there chatting. In Turkey you would probably suspect something is wrong if a restaurant or cafe does not have a few people deeply engrossed in conversation. It was the second day of Ramazan, which was probably why these two were not nursing glasses of çay. Reassured, I went out and sat down at the table where The Family had already ordered the coffee.

This style of coffee was heated in a bed of sand at the center of the tray. Clouds had come in a couple of hours earlier, and there was a slight drizzle. The day had turned cold, and it was nice to sit at a table which radiated heat. I’d forgotten how hot sand could become. In a short while the coffee started to boil, and we could pour a small shot into the little cups in front of us. We sat at our warm table, nursed the strong and sweet coffee, and waited out the drizzle. The crowd of tourists we’d seen in the morning had disappeared. Perhaps everyone had found a nice cafe to warm themselves in.

Earth Day

Today is Earth Day. It is meant to remind us of the problems we need to solve if we are to continue living healthy and happy lives. “Earth Day Network works year round to solve climate change, to end plastic pollution, to protect endangered species, and to broaden, educate, and activate the environmental movement across the globe,” says the web site of the Earth Day network.

In the last few years, every time I have travelled to a wildlife sanctuary, I’ve seen species after species which could be on the road to extinction. The reason is not hunting or wanton killing, it is just our mindless expansion. So, instead of images of magnificent animals, birds or vanishing trees, I thought it might be good to have a photo of consumption. The featured photo is the dregs of a cup of coffee, which I have coloured green and red. Even this little pleasure has consequences. Multiply a cup of coffee a billion times, one for each coffee-lover in the world, and you have cascading effects through the world.

Plato’s coffee shop

A search for coffee in Shanghai one morning brought home to me Plato’s theory of forms. Plato famously put forward the notion of ideal forms and our perception of them in terms of what we call todau Plato’s Cave. In this analogy, we live in a cave, and the ideals roam outside; we perceive them only through the shadow they throw on the cave wall.

I saw this small coffee shop and walked into it. There were a few customers waiting at the bar, a few at the small table behind, sipping their lattes. The number of baristas was larger, and they were really busy. I waited at the bar, and eventually someone took notice of me. “May I have an espresso?” I asked. There was a double take. “Ok, have you ordered already?” The girl at the counter asked me. Some gears wouldn’t move in my head. “Uh. No. Can you take this as an order?”

As we talked, her phone pinged multiple times, and each time she would swipe at something on the screen. The mud slowly slid off the cogs of my mind, and the machinery started grinding. This was a place which took orders by some phone app. Customers were walking in briskly, picking up their orders and leaving. I noticed this as my order was entered into a queue. Eventualy my mental machinery noticed that there was no payment being made. So the credit transaction was also on the web. This was truly Plato’s coffee shop. Almost everything was on the web, and I was only seeing the shadow of this commercial venture in the brick and mortar shop in front of me.

Sure enough, when I received my coffee and asked whether they would take cash or card the machinery ground to a halt. About seven people had a conference. “Cash,” was the answer. I didn’t have exact change. There was a hunt for change. Someone had to go out and get change for me. I was beginning to feel sorry that I’d disrupted this smoothly functioning venture by actually walking in off the street. Office goers gave me discreet lookovers as they took their lattes and walked off.

Process automation seems to always exist in the world of ideals. I seldom find project designs which can also exist in our cave of shadows.