All About Coffee, William H. Ukers [short story to read .txt] 📗
- Author: William H. Ukers
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Another version of this Oriental legend gives it as follows:
The dervish Hadji Omar was driven by his enemies out of Mocha into the desert, where they expected he would die of starvation. This undoubtedly would have occurred if he had not plucked up courage to taste some strange berries which he found growing on a shrub. While they seemed to be edible, they were very bitter; and he tried to improve the taste by roasting them. He found, however, that they had become very hard, so he attempted to soften them with water. The berries seemed to remain as hard as before, but the liquid turned brown, and Omar drank it on the chance that it contained some of the nourishment from the berries. He was amazed at how it refreshed him, enlivened his sluggishness, and raised his drooping spirits. Later, when he returned to Mocha, his salvation was considered a miracle. The beverage to which it was due sprang into high favor, and Omar himself was made a saint.
A popular and much-quoted version of Omar's discovery of coffee, also based upon the Abd-al-Kâdir manuscript, is the following:
In the year of the Hegira 656, the mollah Schadheli went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Arriving at the mountain of the Emeralds (Ousab), he turned to his disciple Omar and said: "I shall die in this place. When my soul has gone forth, a veiled person will appear to you. Do not fail to execute the command which he will give you."
The venerable Schadheli being dead, Omar saw in the middle of the night a gigantic specter covered by a white veil.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The phantom drew back his veil, and Omar saw with surprise Schadheli himself, grown ten cubits since his death. The mollah dug in the ground, and water miraculously appeared. The spirit of his teacher bade Omar fill a bowl with the water and to proceed on his way and not to stop till he reached the spot where the water would stop moving.
"It is there," he added, "that a great destiny awaits you."
Omar started his journey. Arriving at Mocha in Yemen, he noticed that the water was immovable. It was here that he must stop.
The beautiful village of Mocha was then ravaged by the plague. Omar began to pray for the sick and, as the saintly man was close to Mahomet, many found themselves cured by his prayers.
The plague meanwhile progressing, the daughter of the King of Mocha fell ill and her father had her carried to the home of the dervish who cured her. But as this young princess was of rare beauty, after having cured her, the good dervish tried to carry her off. The king did not fancy this new kind of reward. Omar was driven from the city and exiled on the mountain of Ousab, with herbs for food and a cave for a home.
"Oh, Schadheli, my dear master," cried the unfortunate dervish one day; "if the things which happened to me at Mocha were destined, was it worth the trouble to give me a bowl to come here?"
To these just complaints, there was heard immediately a song of incomparable harmony, and a bird of marvelous plumage came to rest in a tree. Omar sprang forward quickly toward the little bird which sang so well, but then he saw on the branches of the tree only flowers and fruit. Omar laid hands on the fruit, and found it delicious. Then he filled his great pockets with it and went back to his cave. As he was preparing to boil a few herbs for his dinner, the idea came to him of substituting for this sad soup, some of his harvested fruit. From it he obtained a savory and perfumed drink; it was coffee.
The Italian Journal of the Savants for the year 1760 says that two monks, Scialdi and Ayduis, were the first to discover the properties of coffee, and for this reason became the object of special prayers. "Was not this Scialdi identical with the Sheik Schadheli?" asks Jardin.[31]
The most popular legend ascribes the discovery of the drink to an Arabian herdsman in upper Egypt, or Abyssinia, who complained to the abbot of a neighboring monastery that the goats confided to his care became unusually frolicsome after eating the berries of certain shrubs found near their feeding grounds. The abbot, having observed the fact, determined to try the virtues of the berries on himself. He, too, responded with a new exhilaration. Accordingly, he directed that some be boiled, and the decoction drunk by his monks, who thereafter found no difficulty in keeping awake during the religious services of the night. The abbé Massieu in his poem, Carmen Caffaeum, thus celebrates the event:
The monks each in turn, as the evening draws near,
Drink 'round the great cauldron—a circle of cheer!
And the dawn in amaze, revisiting that shore,
On idle beds of ease surprised them nevermore!
According to the legend, the news of the "wakeful monastery" spread rapidly, and the magical berry soon "came to be in request throughout the whole kingdom; and in progress of time other nations and provinces of the East fell into the use of it."
The French have preserved the following picturesque version of this legend:
A young goatherd named Kaldi noticed one day that his goats, whose deportment up to that time had been irreproachable, were abandoning themselves to the most extravagant prancings. The venerable buck, ordinarily so dignified and solemn, bounded about like a young kid. Kaldi attributed this foolish gaiety to certain fruits of which the goats had been eating with delight.
The story goes that the poor fellow had a heavy heart; and in the hope of cheering himself up a little, he thought he would pick and eat of the fruit. The experiment succeeded marvelously. He forgot his troubles and became the happiest herder in happy Arabia. When the goats danced, he gaily made himself one of the party, and entered into their fun with admirable spirit.
One day, a monk chanced to pass by and stopped in surprise to find a ball going on. A score of goats were executing lively pirouettes like a ladies' chain, while the buck solemnly balancé-ed, and the herder went through the figures of an eccentric pastoral dance.
The astonished monk inquired the cause of this saltatorial madness; and Kaldi told him of his precious discovery.
Now, this poor monk had a great sorrow; he always went to sleep in the middle of his prayers; and he reasoned that Mohammed without doubt was revealing this marvelous fruit to him to overcome his sleepiness.
Frontispiece from Dufour's work
Piety does not exclude gastronomic instincts. Those of our good monk were more than ordinary; because he thought of drying and boiling the fruit of the herder. This ingenious concoction gave us coffee. Immediately all the monks of the realm made use of the drink, because it encouraged them to pray and, perhaps, also because it was not disagreeable.
In those early days it appears that the drink was prepared in two ways; one in which the decoction was made from the hull and the pulp surrounding the bean, and the other from the bean itself. The roasting process came later and is an improvement generally credited to the Persians. There is evidence that the early Mohammedan churchmen were seeking a substitute for the wine forbidden to them by the Koran, when they discovered coffee. The word for coffee in Arabic, qahwah, is the same as one of those used for wine; and later on, when coffee drinking grew so popular as to threaten the very life of the church itself, this similarity was seized upon by the church-leaders to support their contention that the prohibition against wine applied also to coffee.
La Roque,[32] writing in 1715, says that the Arabian word cahouah signified at first only wine; but later was turned into a generic term applied to all kinds of drink. "So there were really three sorts of coffee; namely, wine, including all intoxicating liquors; the drink made with the shells, or cods, of the coffee bean; and that made from the bean itself."
Originally, then, the coffee drink may have been a kind of wine made from the coffee fruit. In the coffee countries even today the natives are very fond, and eat freely, of the ripe coffee cherries, voiding the seeds. The pulp surrounding the coffee seeds (beans) is pleasant to taste, has a sweetish, aromatic flavor, and quickly ferments when allowed to stand.
Still another tradition (was the wish father to the thought?) tells how the coffee drink was revealed to Mohammed himself by the Angel Gabriel. Coffee's partisans found satisfaction in a passage in the Koran which, they said, foretold its adoption by the followers of the Prophet:
They shall be given to drink an excellent wine, sealed; its seal is that of the musk.
The most diligent research does not carry a knowledge of coffee back beyond the time of Rhazes, two hundred years after Mohammed; so there is little more than speculation or conjecture to support the theory that it was known to the ancients, in Bible times or in the days of The Praised One. Our knowledge of tea, on the other hand, antedates the Christian era. We know also that tea was intensively cultivated and taxed under the Tang dynasty in China, A.D. 793, and that Arab traders knew of it in the following century.
The First Reliable Coffee Date
About 1454 Sheik Gemaleddin Abou Muhammad Bensaid, mufti of Aden, surnamed Aldhabani, from Dhabhan, a small town where he was born, became acquainted with the virtues of coffee on a journey into Abyssinia.[33] Upon his return to Aden, his health became impaired; and remembering the coffee he had seen his countrymen drinking in Abyssinia, he sent for some in the hope of finding relief. He not only recovered from his illness; but, because of its sleep-dispelling qualities, he sanctioned the use of the drink among the dervishes "that they might spend the night in prayers or other religious exercises with more attention and presence of mind.[34]"
It is altogether probable that the coffee drink was known in Aden before the time of Sheik Gemaleddin; but the endorsement of the very learned imam, whom science and religion had already made famous, was sufficient to start a vogue for the beverage that spread throughout Yemen, and thence to the far corners of the world. We read in the Arabian manuscript at the Bibliothéque Nationale that lawyers, students, as well as travelers who journeyed at night, artisans, and others, who worked at night, to escape the heat of the day, took to drinking coffee; and even left off another drink, then becoming popular, made from the leaves of a plant called khat or cat (catha edulis).
Sheik Gemaleddin was assisted in his work of spreading the gospel of this the first propaganda for coffee by one Muhammed Alhadrami, a physician of great reputation, born in Hadramaut, Arabia Felix.
A recently unearthed and little known version of coffee's origin shows how features of both the Omar tradition and the Gemaleddin story may be combined by a professional Occidental tale-writer[35]:
Toward the middle of the fifteenth
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