A single espresso coffee in a demi-tasse.
Photograph courtesy of studio tdes
www.flickr.com/photos/thedailyenglishshow/5612804236/
A French café is more than just the coffee and
pastries it serves.
A successful French café offers minimally comfortable seating and a place where people may meet regularly, drink coffee, or relax and just let the world float by.
A café, in France.
Photograph by courtesy of mia!
www.flickr.com/photos/_mia/2584964985/
In the early evening.
Happy Hour sometimes comes to French cafés
Photograph by courtesy of Archibald Ballantine.
www.flickr.com/photos/johngevers/14004975/
In the early evening.
Happy Hour sometimes comes to French cafés
Photograph by courtesy of Archibald Ballantine.
www.flickr.com/photos/johngevers/14004975/
The first coffee bean
Long before the first French café, there was the first grain de
café, the first coffee bean. That first coffee bean originated on a small
evergreen tree in Ethiopia.
Then, just to confuse me, I was told by people who really do know everything there is to know about coffee in the raw that the coffee bean is, in fact, a seed, not a bean. What we call the coffee bean, in fact, grows inside a coffee cherry, and that makes it a seed. These learned coffee dealers and blenders also told me that you would not want to eat a coffee cherry. So, we are left with the coffee seed. Despite that fact, I want to avoid confusion in this post, and so I will continue calling coffee seeds coffee beans.
Coffee Cherries on the evergreen coffee shrub.
Photograph courtesy of Foto76 through
Freedigitalphotos.net.
The first coffee exporter
From Ethiopia, the beans, and the secrets of making the drink, were exported to Yemen. Yemen would then become the world's first international coffee exporter when she started selling the beans to Turkey. In Turkey, coffee quickly became the most popular national drink, and at that time, anyone who visited Turkey came home praising "Turkish Coffee."
Coffee came to Europe with the Turks when the Ottoman Empire invaded and occupied parts of Eastern and Western Europe. You may say that coffee took Europe by force of arms!
France's first café and oldest café still in operating
Coffee came to France via Austria some years later. Then, according to the accepted tradition, the first French café was opened, in Paris, by two Armenian brothers, Pascal and Grégoire Alep, probably in 1661. The oldest French café still open in France is the Café Le Procope, also in Paris; it opened in 1686. Today Le Procope is no longer a traditional café; today, it is a smart restaurant and not an inexpensive one. Nevertheless, Café Le Procope offers history, excellent food, including a fresh seafood bar, and of course, excellent coffee.
The outside of Le Procope today.
Photograph Courtesy of Serge Melk
www.flickr.com/photos/sergemelki/3364276074/
The original owner of Le Procope was an
Italian immigrant from Palermo, Sicily, Francesco Procopio;
unfortunately, Francesco was not available for an interview the last time I
visited. Le Procope’s traditions include the claim to have introduced ice-cream to
France.
The inside of Le Procope today
Photograph by courtesy of Michael Rys
www.flickr.com/photos/mrys/176993289/
Having a coffee in Le Procope today.
If you visit Le Procope today when all you want is a coffee and an ice cream, along with a feeling of history, then do so outside their regular lunch and dinner hours. At lunch and dinner, every table in Le Procope is taken. Later, while you sip your coffee, consider that you may well be sitting at the same spot where in the past sat John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Pain, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Danton, Marat, or possibly Robespierre. That is real coffee history.
The oil in the bean is far more important than the roast.
The packaging of most branded coffees will tell you the type of
roast but little else; however, the amount of oil in the bean coffee affects
the taste far more than the roast. The perfect roast cannot produce flavor from
dry, oil-less beans. For those who will visit France and Italy on the same
European trip, you may taste the difference in their coffees. The French use
the oiliest beans, followed by the Italians.
Grains de Café, Coffee Beans.Photograph courtesy of Apple’s Eyes Studio
through Freedigtalphotos.net. The two beans that fight for your business.
Behind the scenes battling for market share are two coffee beans, the Robusta and the Arabica, and their various hybrid family members. The Arabica has 50% less caffeine and is considered the best for flavor, but it is much more expensive, and so nearly all coffees on the market are blends of the two beans.
Inside a coffee importer’s warehouses, there are highly trained and highly paid coffee blenders; these employees, like the blenders in the great Champagne and Cognac Houses, have unique taste and olfactory taste buds. For their most valuable customers, the café and restaurant industry, they prepare special blends for each customer. After blending and roasting, these blends will have a taste and smell that does not vary from batch to batch, month to month or year to year.
The barista, the most important individual in the cafe.
In the best French cafés, the espresso coffee machine will be under the control of a maître de barista, a master operator of an industrial espresso machine. The title barista comes from the Italian, as the Italians invented the espresso coffee machines, they also own the name. A barista has nothing to do with a British attorney, a barrister! Coffee gourmets will tell you that only an expert barista can dispense a perfect cup of coffee every time. The correct heat of the water, the proper water pressure, and the correct packing of the coffee for the espresso machine complete the work of a maître de barista. The makers of the various espresso coffee machines run training courses for baristas. To make the perfect cup of coffee, the barista has to be trained like any other professional.
My own coffee production
I am not an expert barista, but I have owned, at various times, filter coffee machines, percolators, and at least ten different espresso coffee machines. Today, balancing taste with convenience, I make a reasonably good coffee at home using a French coffee press. For the true café aficionados, my coffee may not be good enough to make the top grade, but they are kind enough to remain silent when they are in my home. I have tried similar coffees with other machines in the homes of friends who use other coffee brands, and most of those coffees have also been excellent.
A cappuccino.
Photograph Courtesy of Akeeris though
Freedigitalphotos.net.
How the French make coffee at home.
In French homes, a cafetière, a French coffee press, was always the most
popular method for making the morning café au lait. Filter coffee machines are
sold in France, but they are not very popular, and in French cafés and
restaurants, espresso coffee rules. Many French homes that do not use a French
coffee press use a coffee percolator; however, the pressurized Nespresso-style
machines gain ground all the time.
A cafetière, a French coffee press.
N.B. The cafetière, despite its French and English
names, is, like the Espresso machine, an Italian invention.
Photograph courtesy of Joe King
www.flickr.com/photos/jking89/4573304032/
To order coffee in a French café click on this
post:
Ordering Coffee in France, The A - Z
of Ordering Coffee in France.
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