Episode notes
Turkish coffee leaves the grounds in the cup. Arabica beans are roasted in a shallow iron pan, cooled in a walnut box that wicks away surface oil, and ground to a powder of 75 to 125 microns. Water, coffee, and sugar go into a tapered copper cezve and are pulled from the heat the moment a foam crust rises, sometimes flavored with cardamom, mastic, or ambergris. The drink began with Sufi mystics in Yemen who boiled roasted beans for night vigils, and the first Istanbul coffee houses opened around 1554, founded by Hakam of Aleppo and Shams of Damascus.
Within 15 years there were over 600 coffee houses in Istanbul, and rulers feared them as hubs of dissent: coffee shipments were sunk in 1543, and under Murad IV repeat offenders were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosphorus, while sultans kept a chief coffee maker in the palace. Europeans at first found the brew too bitter and costly, so they diluted it, and Pasqua Rosée's 1652 London ad promised cures for gout and scurvy. The Dutch and French later broke the Yemeni monopoly, and by the French Revolution 80 percent of the world's coffee came from the Americas.
- Fortune tellers read the patterns of grounds in an upturned cup, a practice called tasseography.
- A prospective bride may secretly salt the groom's coffee to test whether he drinks it without complaint.
- Shortages around World War II led Turks to roast and grind chickpeas as a stand-in.
- After the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, Greek cafes renamed the same drink Greek coffee.
- Bosnian coffee uses a second boil to build an extra thick foam called kaimak.