WORLD'S COFFEE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS Page 9

The best trade authorities stress home-grinding, and are opposed to boiling the beverage. They advocate also its use as a breakfast beverage, after lunch, and after the evening meal.

From an American point of view, the principal defects in the English method of making coffee lie in the roasting, handling, and brewing. It has been charged that the beans are not properly cooked in the first place, and that they are too often stale before being ground. The English run to a light or cinnamon roast, whereas the best American practise requires a medium, high, or city roast. A fairly high shade of brown is favored on the South Downs with a light shade for Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the south of Scotland. The trade demands, for the most part, a ripe chestnut brown. Wholesale roasting is done by gas and coke machines; while retail dealers use mostly a small type of inner-heated gas machine. The large gas machines (with capacities running from twenty-five to seven hundred pounds) have external air-blast burners, direct and indirect burners, sliding burners, etc. The best known are the Faulder and Moorewood machines. In the Uno, a popular retail machine, roasting seven to fourteen pounds at a time, the coffee beans are placed in the space between outer and inner concentric cylinders, one made of perforated steel, and the other of wire gauze, revolving together. A gas flame of the Bunsen type burns inside the inner cylinder, its heat traversing the outer, or coffee cylinder, while the fumes are driven off through the open ends. The roasting coffee may be viewed through a mica or wire-gauze panel inserted in the wall of the outer cylinder. The Faulder machine has an external flame, a capacity of from seven to fourteen pounds; and there are quick gas machines, with capacities ranging from three pounds to two hundred and twenty-four pounds, for the retail trade.

In recent years there has been a marked improvement in English coffee roasting, due to the intelligent study brought to bear upon the subject by leaders of the trade's thought, and by the retail distributer, who, in the person of the retail grocer, is, generally speaking, better educated to his business than the retail grocer in any other country. Years ago, it was the practise to use butter or lard to improve the appearance of the bean in roasting; but this is not so common as formerly.

The British consumer, however, will need much instruction before the national character of the beverage shows a uniform improvement. While the coffee may be more carefully roasted, better "cooked" than it was formerly, it is still remaining too long unsold after roasting, or else it is being ground too long a time before making. These abuses are, however, being corrected; and the consumer is everywhere being urged to buy his coffee freshly roasted and to have it freshly ground. Another factor has undoubtedly contributed to give England a bad name among lovers of good coffee, and that is certain tinned "coffees," composed of ground coffee and chicory, mixtures that attained some vogue for a time as "French" coffee. They found favor, perhaps, because they were easily handled. Package coffees have not been developed in England as in America; but there is a more or less limited field for them, and there are several good brands of absolutely pure coffee on the market.

The demi-tasse is a popular drink after luncheon, after dinner, and even during the day, especially in the cities. In London, there are cafés that make a specialty of it; places like Peel's, Groom's, and the Café Nero in the city; also the shops of the London Café Co., and Ye Mecca Co.

While, in the home, it is customary to steep the coffee; in hotels and restaurants some form of percolating apparatus, extractor, or steam machine is employed. There are the Criterion (employing a drip tray for making coffee in the Etzenberger style); Fountain; Platow; Syphon (Napier); and Verithing extractors, put out by Sumerling & Co. of London; and the well-known J. & S. rapid coffee-making machine, having an infuser, and producing coffee by steam pressure, manufactured by W.M. Still & Sons, Ltd., London.

American visitors complain that coffee in England is too thick and syrupy for their liking. Coffee in restaurants is served "white" (with milk), or black, in earthen, stoneware, or silver pots. In chain restaurants, like Lyons' or the A.B.C., there is to be found on the tariff, "hot milk with a dash of coffee."

As to the boiling method, this is already generally discredited in the countries of western Europe. The steeping method so much favored in England may be responsible for some of the unkind things said about English coffee; because it undoubtedly leads to the abuse of over-infusion, so that the net result is as bad as boiling.

The vast majority of the English people are, however, confirmed tea drinkers, and it is extremely doubtful if this national habit, ingrained through centuries of use of "the cup that cheers" at breakfast and at tea time in the afternoon can ever be changed.

As already mentioned in this work, the London coffee houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to a type of coffee house whose mainstay was its food rather than its drink. In time, these too began to yield to the changing influences of a civilization that demanded modern hotels, luxurious tea lounges, smart restaurants, chain shops, tea rooms, and cafés with and without coffee. A certain type of "coffee shop," with rough boarded stalls, sanded floors and "private rooms," frequented by lower class workingmen, were to be found in England for a time; but because of their doubtful character, they were closed up by the police.

Among other places in London where coffee may be had in English or continental style, mention should be made of the Café Monico, a good place to drop in for a coffee and liqueur, and one of the pioneers of the modern restaurant; Gatti's, where café filtré, or coffee produced by the filtration method, is a specialty; the cosmopolitan Savoy with its popular tea lounge (teas, sixty cents); the Piccadilly Hotel, with its Louis XIV restaurant catering to refined and luxurious tastes; the Waldorf Hotel, with its American clientèle and its palm court (teas, thirty-six cents); the Cecil, with its palm court and tea balcony, also having a special attraction for Americans; Lyons' Popular Café (iced coffee, twelve cents); the Trocadero with its special Indian curries prepared by native cooks once each week; the Temple Bar restaurant, an attractive refectory owned by the semi-philanthropic Trust-Houses, Ltd., which runs some two hundred similar establishments throughout the country, serving alcoholic drinks but stressing non-intoxicating beverages, among them special Mocha at six and eight cents a cup; Slater's, Ltd., catering mostly to business folk in the city, there being about a score of restaurants and tea rooms under this name with retail shops attached; the British Tea Table Association, like Slater's, a grown-up sister of the olden bun shop of Queen Victoria's day; and the Kardomah chain of cafés, where one is reasonably sure to get a satisfying cup of coffee and a cake.

Supplementing the above, Charles Cooper, some time editor of the Epicure and The Table, has prepared for this work some notes on the evolution of the old-time London coffee houses into the present-day tea rooms, tea lounges, cafés, and restaurants for all comers. Mr. Cooper says of the transformation: