Coffee Talk

The earthy smell wafting through the kitchen, came from my parents’ percolator and let me know it was time to start moving. Around the sink was a mad scramble to find the urn’s innards, called, “guts.” My mother brewed a pot she and Dad nursed until it was finished. Or burnt beyond recognition. The morning cup was only the first. Otherwise, how else would you know when the meal was over?

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Though my parents both worshiped the elixir, my mother couponed for the cheapest cans of Yuban anyway, sometimes pouring the leftovers into a pitcher and throwing them into the microwave—days later. 

They climbed onto the Mr. Coffee drip train sometime in the 1980s, where you had to line up the cover of the carafe to the basket perfectly and use the correct filter, or the brew traveled across the counter in a soul crushing, grainy mess. Yes, yes, I speak from bitter experience.

My sister and I fell in with a family from the former Yugoslavia. Their phenomenal mother navigated seven children and prepared surprisingly delightful things inside small pastries, accompanied by heated carafes of Turkish coffee—a syrupy cup of intense, organic goodness. It wasn’t until I traveled to the Middle East in my late teens that I actually tasted its thick, coarse brew for myself. It is one of the few things I managed to wait for that’s been worth it.

I began drinking coffee as a young teen because I needed an ID for a gin and tonic, but a cup of coffee was available to anyone who wanted to act mature. My friend and I sipped porcelain mugs in a diner on Avenue M where they put pickles and coleslaw on the table before the burger, and allowed us to enjoy our bottomless cups as the sophisticates our adolescent selves ached to be.

I skipped my mother’s coffee and bought mine in the corner bodega. It was served in a paper cup I could wrap my hands around to stay warm, one tiny corner of plastic cover peeled back to sip through. Regular, to me, tasted like a pint of milk and a field of sugar and everyone liked it that way. Piping hot, it was fresh until around 4:30, when most things begin to grow stale anyway.

In the post college move to Los Angeles I upgraded the ritual. In the supermarket there was a wall of whole beans and a machine in which to grind them before bringing them home. I traveled beyond Maxwell House and into flavors with names that reminded me of the nail polish I stole from that corner bodega as a kid. Java Explosion. Columbian Delight. Kenyan Bold. Kiss Me Red. Cotton Candy Breakfast Blend. It’s all the same. 

I made a discovery when I met my husband who doesn't drink coffee, tea, or booze. This offends many people’s sensibilities to the core. Including mine, in the beginning at least.

They implore him, armed with a cigar box version of herbal teas.

“I’m ok,” he’ll say. “I have juice.”

“Mimosa then?” they’ll demand.

He encouraged me to buy a machine that would grind and brew. Beyond that, he wants a fruity something, some hummus, and to be left alone—a simplicity I’ve come to appreciate, if I haven’t always been able to respect. 

At the very beginning of the American coffee house craze, a friend and I would go to lunch at a cheap buffet in Los Angeles that had fresh salads and endless bread. One of us paid for lunch. The other paid for the newly opened Starbucks. We wound up even. It was a harbinger of overpriced lattes to come. The Souplantation buffet is long gone but the venti lives on. 

When my husband and I were dating, he learned how to brew Turkish coffee for me in a samovar over a gas flame on the stove, just like I remembered. It was delicious despite the fact that he never tasted it. That was then. Now he claims not to remember. Is it possible I made the whole thing up? I transitioned to a one cup machine and embraced my fate.

I tried a French press once. It was a good cup: ground, boiled, pressed—though it came off like an elitist extra cloaked in simplicity, as if revisiting my mother’s percolator. Or vinyl.

My mother gave up milk in her coffee while I was in my early twenties. “After a few cups, you barely think about it.” She is also the woman who told me, “I lost the seven pounds I gained a few days after you were born. No big deal.” She was either an ox with a formidable metabolism, or someone with an otherworldly capacity to disregard difficulty. I have none of these things, though I later found out she was right about the milk.

We took our sons on a trip to Italy where they found fresh gelato and I met the magic of a tiny, perfect, well composed cup of beans, garnished with a lemon peel. I switched to espresso sized tastings, appreciating the bitter bite for as long as it lasted. One of the sad rules of life is this: after three first three gulps of anything, a person finishes rather than enjoys.

For my husband’s fortieth birthday, his mother bought him a single pod brew—this is perhaps enough for its own story, and I am forever grateful. It changed my world. Perfectly fresh, no mess, every time. The names on the pods ended in vowels—capriccio, lavanto, arpeggio—my eight year old son correlated the colors of the tiny capsules to the ones everyone he loved preferred—those of us who drank coffee, anyway. 

The several trips back to Israel have proven to me that my first coffee love is Turkish, with its viscosity versus the sugar cube and a bunch of bitterness, punctuated by a dash of cardamom. And I am still grateful that while I married the only man who doesn’t drink, who comes from the only Middle Eastern family that doesn’t smoke, they absolutely appreciate the magic of a well poured cup.

I waited patiently for my potential drinkers to grow up. They held fast to their father’s room temperature, sugary drink preference. Then, over the summer, that son who was the cutest coffee pod barista came home from college. 

He said it casually, like it was nothing! “I started drinking coffee.”

Poor thing, he didn’t see me coming as I hurled myself across the kitchen floor and started planning all the equipment I could set up for him in his dorm room, sharing the discoveries I’d made along the way.

The other day on Amazon, they sent me a suggestion. Turkish coffee pods with cardamom! Appalled at the algorithm for knowing me so well, I ordered them, over-the-moon to have them show up at my door.

When we talk about coffee, the ways to make it will evolve or devolve as these things do, but the journey to a perfect cup of joe is timeless.