Brevities

If you brew your breakfast coffee or after-dinner demi-tasse either in a percolator or tricolator or the modern Silex coffee pots which, with their striking combination of glass and metal, grace the most sumptuous table, you hardly realize that you do something which is forbidden to some of your less free, less emancipated sisters.

Yes, strange as it may sound, there are even unto this day desert tribes who consider that coffee brewing is distinctly a male privilege and do not permit any woman to handle the coffee pot or even to serve the finished drink. To them coffee has an almost religious importance and they swear by it as by something sacred, something that contains magic powers and gives to body and mind renewed strength and vigor.

All Oriental people are great lovers of coffee, and Oriental Jews share this preference for coffee with Turks and Arabs. Whoever enters an Oriental household as a welcomed guest may be certain to receive an offering of always fresh-made coffee, served in special small cups which have often no handles but rest in tiny metal holders of inlaid gold or chased silver. This coffee—we have learned to call it Turkish coffee—looks very different from the clear, pellucid drink Western people consider desirable. The coffee used for the Oriental treat is pounded with a pestle into a fine pulverized mixture and then cooked in a small brass pot with a very long handle over a charcoal fire. Usually sugar is immediately added and the finished product, served without straining, tastes rather thick and syruppy. Yet this sugar is really a concession to the taste of the foreigner.

True Easterners like the “Kaffa Murr”—the bitter coffee—in which no addition disguises the flavor and taste of the precious coffee bean, and they consider that this coffee alone is worthy to appear on ceremonial occasions. It is always young men, the sons or nephews of the host, who serve it and replenish the tiny cups whenever the guest has drained the drink. But though it would be impolite and even insulting to refuse a second cup it is considered illmannered and greedy to accept more than three helpings. The proper ceremonial of coffee drinking is something quite important in the East, and in ancient times a slip in the ceremonial was apt to lead to personal enmity and tribal feud.

And because coffee was considered so excellent a stimulant the selfish males wanted to deny their women folk a share in it. But we can well imagine the Eastern ladies merely smiling at male obtuseness while sitting in their own quarters and drinking as good and better coffee than any brewed by husband, brother, or son.