A nice cup of coffee

When I was little we had coffee at breakfast time, made in a percolator with coffee grounds cut with chicory, or we had a milky drink made with Camp Coffee, a sort of chicory essence. Camp Coffee was first made over a hundred and forty years ago, but I think these days it is mostly used for flavouring such desserts and cakes. There are far more options now; decent instant coffees and all sorts of machines to make different types of ‘real’ coffee.

These days if you go out for a coffee the amount of choice is almost baffling, and you here discussions and arguments about what exactly a ‘corto’ is or a ‘flat white’. The first of these new styles of coffee that I remember was a cappuccino, which comes from the Italian word for hood; in fact there was an order of monks called Capuchin because they  have hoods. The word in terms of coffee started in about the 1930’s

In Italy,  a coffee was being called cappuccino 1930’s, but who knows when that style of coffee was first made, let alone first sold! There was something similar being sold in coffee shops in Vienna several centuries earlier, and some recipes included cream, eggs, sugar and spice. This reminds me a little of chair, which is milky and spicy and sweet. However, technology is what changed everything; now we have a whole range of coffee machines which can produce coffee in all different forms, to suit any taste or style.

A friend rang me tonight to arrange to meet for a coffee tomorrow… no doubt we will meet in our favourite place, and no doubt I will have an Americano, but while I stand and wait for my order I will look at all the different things on offer, and marvel at the variety!