The Devil’s Cup
I’ve been on a bit of a food-lit kick over the last couple of months, so when I finished up my last one, Real Food by Nina Planck, I wasn’t sure where to go next. Then I stumbled upon The Devil’s Cup, a quick read on the history of coffee.
In it, Stewart Allen retraces the steps of coffee… it’s earliest known cultivation in Ethiopia and Yemen (then al Mekkha… hence the term Mocha), to it’s journey into India and Europe and finally the America’s where 90% of the worlds coffee is grown today. While I expected to find delicious descriptions of complex, dark flavors the book instead kept me amused with Stewart’s misadventures in war-torn countries, exploration of coffee’s role in religion, dealings just on the questionable side of the law and tales of lore around the coffee plant. Stewart’s casual yet frentetic writing style is likely the most caffeinated thing about the book, but makes for an enjoyable read if you like a bit of fun mixed in with your historical facts and speculation. Perhaps most fascinating is Stewart’s premise that coffee consumption is somewhat, if not completely, responsible for the cultivation of modern society from early developments of algebra to government revolutions. True or not, advances in human thinking and coffee becoming widely consumed in a country do seem to have an interesting correlation, and Stewart’s arguments are entertaining if not entirely solid.
