water, too often half-warm, on a handful or
two of sloe-leaves and dust, suits our peculiar
attribute: a barbaric indifference to the
intellectual gratification of the appetite and
digestion.

The old French way of making coffee,
before 1805, was to put the powder in boiling
water, to warm it over the fire to boiling
point, then to take it off and let it settle,
clarifying it with isinglass or fish-skins, and
decanting it before serving. Café à la Grecque
was passed through a pointed bag. But
a certain wise man, M. de Belloy, nephew of
the venerable Cardinal, who, in 1805, was
Archbishop of Paris and the Nestor of the Gallican
Church, at last discovered that the old plan was
a bad plan. He found that coffee lost in the
various boilings, its aroma, force, and spirit. The
ebullition carried away further virtues, and the
fish-skin and bag gave it a foreign taint unpleasant
and injurious. Belloy took the matter
seriously to heart, and in a moment of
inspiration devised the percolator. He also took
care never to let the coffee-roaster burn his
coffee-berries, for even one burnt berry rendered
several pounds of coffee, bitter and acrid. He
never allowed him to roast it till it was black,
and chose a golden blond colour rather than
brown as his ideal. The Café sans Ebullition was
patronised by M. Foulquier, proprietor of the
Café des Etrangers in the Palais Royal, and
soon became popular, thanks to the zeal of Dr.
Gastaldy, an enlightened physician and
profound gourmet of those days.

Ude, the great chef at Crockford's, used to
allow one cup of coffee powder, to make two good
cups of liquid. He poured boiling water into
the biggin on the coffee, considering it equally
infused when it began to bubble on the surface.
He then placed the bottom of the biggin in a
bain-marie, or vessel with boiling water, to keep
the coffee hot. He used as a filter, a bag of
thick flannel, as being better than tammy. His
one rule was a true French one. He says:

"Coffee can never be too strong, and may
always be diluted with boiled cream. Weak
coffee is never worth drinking."

Ude could make coffee (as he used to do by
request before Count d'Orsay, Lord Vernon,
Lord Allen, &c.) better and quicker than any
one, notwithstanding, as he writes pathetically,
"the contradictions that I have experienced in
the St. James's Club from some noblemen who
have certainly made a vow never to be pleased,
however well they may be served."

In 1805 French medical men strongly
denounced the fondness of the ladies of Paris for
café au lait for breakfast. It made them sallow
and heated their blood; it was supposed by the
faculty to be eminently bilious, and as
unwholesome as café à l'eau was beneficial.

It was about 1810 that it began to be observed
that coffee was becoming a great article of
consumption in France, especially in Paris: about
that time it had already supplanted the vin
ordinaire at the usual breakfast of the artisans,
ouvriers, and even the mere street labourers.
Those burly women of the Halle—the retailers
of herbs, fruits, vegetables, and fish, who had
once followed the drums to Versailles—now
began to be seen between the pillars of the Rue
de la Tonnellerie at an early hour with great
saucers full of hot coffee, in which they soaked
great chunks of bread.

The amount of coffee supply, which had been
found sufficient for thirty years before this,
had now become quite inadequate. In Germany,
and all through the north of Europe, chicory
root began to be openly sold. In Flanders, vast
fields of this plant were grown, to be dried,
roasted, and mixed with coffee. In some
Flemish villages more than a million of francs
was annually realised by this. It began to be
known in Paris about 1790, and it was found
that two-thirds of the swindling powder could
be mixed with good coffee, without fear of detection.
The root, at all events, is harmless, and
should be avowedly mixed with coffee, to lower
its price; if secretly mixed, a paternal government
like Turkey would not hesitate a moment in
nailing the rascally retailer's ear to his own doorpost.
The cheat of chicory did one good thing:
the grocers ceased to mix roasted rye with
their coffee, and substituted the Flemish plant.

Before the Revolution, the French used to
be fond of a pinch of vanille in their coffee;
but in the First Consulate time the great
European wars prevented the fruit capsules
of the precious orchis from reaching France
by way of Spain. Some shrewd energetic
epicures of a practical tendency soon found a
substitute for vanille. They took a handful of
oats, and boiled them for five minutes in rice
water. This water was then removed, the oats
were boiled again for half an hour, and the
decoction was then strained through a bag of thin
muslin. This water, used for coffee-making, gave
the beverage a vanille flavour. This was the
discovery of M. du Moulin, maître d'hôtel of the
Count de Barruel de Beauvert. The vanille
coffee was found to cheer the mind, and to fatten
without heating the body. Owing to the war,
vanille husks were at this time, in Paris, two
hundred francs the pound.

In 1810, two Parisian chemists invented a
conserve de café, an essence of coffee. Two
spoonfuls made a four-ounce cup (ordinary size);
it merely required to be mixed with boiling
water and sugar. Coffee was then from five to
six francs a pound. The essence was thought
inferior to good Levant or Martinique coffee;
but better than the inferior sorts. One of these
discoverers, M. Lamerque, a Bordelais of the
Rue de Bac, also extracted from coffee, an
essential oil, balsamic and cephalic; he
invented, too, a liqueur, which he called The
Cream of Mocha Coffee, and coffee bon-bons,
which were white, and of a tonic quality.
Coffee was at this time much used by the
Parisians to flavour creams, ices, and sorbets.

"Original" Walker, writing in 1835, strongly
upheld the superiority of tea to coffee when
travelling. Tea allays fever and thirst, he
says, and coffee causes both. Coffee increases
the natural fever of travel. The French, he
observed, drank it at breakfast drowned in hot