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Roasting Coffee

Coffee when roasted, and especially when ground, loses its aroma.

If roasted too fast or too much, it is little better than so much charcoal. Hence it should be roasted in an implement made for the purpose, or else in a closed vessel slowly and with constant motion. If a little butter and sugar be beaten together and added to the coffee after it becomes hot, it will assist in holding the aroma, the essential part of coffee.

III. How to Make Tea.

THE old-fashioned rule, and a good one, is a heaping teaspoonful for each person and an extra one for the pot. For, unlike the Chinese, we drink tea strong, and with milk or sugar, or both. Tea should be made with soft water. Filtered rain-water is good. One way is to scald a metal teapot, put in the tea, pour in half the required quantity of boiling water, cover the pot with a "cosey," (a quilted cover to slip over the pot to keep it hot), and at the end of ten or fifteen minutes add the other half of the water. It is then ready to be poured into hot teacups. Serve by filling the cups half full. Then add more water to the pot and fill the cups, not too full.

Another way of making tea is to scald the pot, again fill it with boiling water, then put in the proper quantity of tea and let it stand, covered, until the leaves settle to the bottom of the pot, or about ten minutes.

IV. The Tea-Making of Various Peoples.

THE Chinaman puts his tea in a cup, and pours hot water upon it, and drinks the infusion of the leaves without addition. The Japanese triturates the leaves before putting them into the pot. In Morocco, they put green tea, a little tansy and a great deal of sugar in the teapot, and fill up with boiling water. In Bokhara, every man carries a small bag of tea about with him, a certain quantity of which he hands over to the booth-keeper whom he patronizes, who concocts the beverage for him. The Bokhariote tea-toper finds it as difficult to pass a tea-booth as our dram-drinker does to go by a whiskey-shop. His breakfast beverage is Schitschaj, that is, tea flavored with milk, cream or mutton fat, in which bread is soaked. During the daytime, sugarless green tea is drunk, with the accompaniment of cakes of fur and mutton suet. It is considered an inexcusable breach of manners to cool the hot cup of tea with the breath; but the difficulty is overcome by supporting the right elbow in the left hand and giving a circular movement to the cup. How long each kind of tea takes to draw is calculated to the second; and when the teapot is emptied it is passed round among the company for each tea-drinker to take up as many leaves as can be held between the thumb and finger-the leaves being esteemed by these people an especial dainty.

V. A Cup of Coffee.

SHERBADDIN, an old Arab author, asserts that the first man who drank coffee was a Mufti of Aden, who lived about A. D. 1500, or, as he puts it, in the ninth century of the Hegira. Even Arab authors should always leave room for a proviso. Perhaps some obscure person whose name has never come down to posterity, may have seen goats get "skittish" from eating the berries, as is related of a certain Dervish who is also credited with thus having discovered the virtue of cahui, as it was originally called. Coffee is good enough English, though an ex-alderman of Chicago is said to have spelled it without using a single correct letter, "kawphy."

He did, however, get in two letters of the original He spells the name of his adopted city name. "Shecawgow."