Drink - Coffee-drinkers are not the mugs they used to be, finds Victoria Moore
"One more cup of coffee for the road," moans Otis Redding in the tobacco-stained voice that holds a dusky sunset in every note. And you know he is not talking about a Starbucks. Cigarettes and coffee used to be sexy. They were two-day-old stubble, Johnny Depp, lingerie on the floor beside the bed, and the hammering of typewriter keys all night long. Now they're a "lartay" and a Silk Cut Ultra extra light, and it's all the fault of Starbucks.
Which, by the by, brings me to another pet hate. "Latte" means milk, not coffee, and not even coffee with milk, and it is pronounced with a double "t" because it is Italian and the Italians enunciate double consonants. It is not a word that dimbo blondes should even try to say. And "skinny" is what people are if they don't eat enough, not something you put in your mouth. But the babyish language is just the beginning. While pretending to foster an appreciation of the coffee bean, what Starbucks is actually doing, whether it means to or not, is undermining the whole silted edifice of coffee culture, amassed over the centuries from the grounds of countless cups of the stuff.
A real cup of coffee does not come in a cheerful polystyrene cup with something that resembles a plastic weaning nipple to suck upon. It comes in ceramic, sometimes with a saucer, striated with dribbles from the previous drink. It tastes like it hurt someone to make it: fierce and bitter - "Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love," goes the Turkish proverb. It should not taste like milk with coffee essence, or like something Horlicksy that your mother might tuck you under the duvet with. Real coffee enters the bloodstream like a hit, scraping unmercifully against the walls of a pre-breakfast stomach, inducing the same light headrush as a rare drag on an unfiltered cigarette.
The millions-of-dollars takeaway industry seems to have happened so quickly. One minute only people who liked coffee drank it: connoisseurs have long been aware that a grey cup of "instant", indistinguishable - bar the addition of milk - from a mug of weak gravy, has nothing to do with coffee. People in the know bought beans and grinders, smuggled coffeemakers of all shapes and sizes back from the Continent and made sure they never washed them. Coffee's credibility teetered for a little while when the cafetiere happened. Yes, it used fresh beans and it was for years the centrepiece of every dinner table in Middle England; but the cafetiere, with its mincing little plunger, never made a decent brew. Then, wham-bam, out of the blue, plastic coffee houses on every corner, filled not with Left Bank intellectual types, but with young mothers and pramfuls of screaming infants. Try to linger artistically in one of those and you'll more likely finish up with a manuscript stained not with the coffee, the grimy watermark of hard work and inspiration, but with baby sick, the symbol of sensibleness and duty.
My friend Claire was so horror-stricken when Starbucks colonised Islington that she declared she had to move out. My own reaction is somewhat less violent. I don't need Starbucks: I know how to make a sexy cup of coffee for myself. Provided you use a metal Italian coffee-maker (called a Moka), of the type that sits on the hob and clears its throat when it's finished, and a good dose of Lavazza, you can't go far wrong. Warming the milk (but not boiling it: foam and skin are bad), if you like it white, helps. Wimps can add hot water from the kettle, too. Failing that, Bar Italia in Soho does the job, just as it always has, and it stays open way into the small hours. Then again, if you need to know how to make good coffee you'll probably be in bed by that time.
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