The internet as we know it today began with a coffee pot. Despite the ring of exaggeration, that claim isn’t actually so far-fetched. When most of us go online, we expect something new: often not just something new to read, but something new to watch. This, as those of us past a certain age will recall, was not the case with the early World Wide Web, consisting as it mostly did of static pages of text, updated irregularly if at all. Younger readers will have to imagine even that being a cutting-edge thrill, but we didn’t really feel like we were living in the future until the fall of 1993, when XCoffee first went live.
This groundbreaking technological project “started back in the dark days of 1991,” writes co-creator Quentin Stafford-Fraser, “when the World Wide Web was little more than a glint in CERN’s eye.” At the time, Stafford-Fraser was employed as one of fifteen researchers in the “Trojan Room” of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. “Being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room. However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn’t last long.”
It occurred to Stafford-Fraser to train an unused video camera from the Trojan Room on the coffee pot (and thus the amount of coffee available within), then connect it to a computer, specifically an Acorn Archimedes. His colleague Paul Jardetzky “wrote a ‘server’ program, which ran on that machine and captured images of the pot every few seconds at various resolutions, and I wrote a ‘client’ program which everybody could run, which connected to the server and displayed an icon-sized image of the pot in the corner of the screen. The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.”
XCoffee, the resulting program, was meant only to provide this much-needed information to Computer Lab members elsewhere in the building. But after the release of image-displaying web browsers in 1993, it found a much wider audience as the world’s first streaming webcam. Stafford-Fraser’s successors “resurrected the system, treated it to a new frame grabber, and made the images available on the World Wide Web. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have looked at the coffee pot, making it undoubtedly the most famous in the world.” Stafford-Fraser wrote these words in 1995; in the years thereafter XCoffee went on to receive millions of views before its eventual shutdown in 2001.
In the Centre for Computing History video above, Stafford-Fraser shows the very Olivetti camera he originally used to monitor the coffee level. (He’d previously worked at the Olivetti Research Laboratory, whose parent company also owned Acorn Computers.) “We could see things at a distance before,” he says. “We could view television programs, we could look through telescopes.” But only after the Trojan Room’s coffee pot hit the internet could we “see what’s happening now, somewhere else in the world,” on demand. Thirty years after XCoffee’s development, we’re mesmerized by live-streaming stars and surrounded by “smart” home appliances, hoping for nothing so much as way to concentrate on our immediate surroundings again — to wake up, if you like, and smell the coffee.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
As a beverage of choice and necessity for much of the population in parts of the ancient world, beer has played an important role in archaeology. Beer cans, on the other hand, have not. Unlike millennia-old recipes, beer cans seem like no more than trash, even in a field where trash is highly treasured. This is a mistake, says archeologist Jane Busch. “The historical archaeologist who ignores the beer can at his site is like the prehistoric archeologist who ignores historic pottery.”
David Maxwell, an expert in animal bones who trained as a Mayanist, has recognized the truth of this statement by turning his passion for beer can collecting into beer can archaeology, a tiny niche within the smaller field of “tin can archaeology.” Maxwell became the reigning expert on beer can dating when “in 1993, he published a field-identification guide in Historical Archaeology,” notes Jessica Gingrich at Atlas Obscura, “which has since become an industry standard and his most-read work.”
The first commercial canned beer appeared in 1935, after several unsuccessful experiments starting in 1909. Experiments in beer canning took a hiatus during Prohibition, and canned beer itself went off the market during WWII as supplies of tin plate were rerouted to the war effort. During that interregnum, only the military shipped canned beer, to soldiers overseas in olive and camo-colored cans. When sales resumed after the war, beer cans assumed more routinized design elements. Maxwell himself became fascinated with beer cans from afar. “While canned beer sales exploded in the United States after World War II, Gingrich writes, “the industry failed to take off in Canada until the 1980s.”
As a child in Canada, Maxwell collected bottle caps. “All the beer came in the same shape bottle,” he says. Cans seemed exotic, especially those of an older vintage. “They had punches to open them instead of pull rings, and all I knew was that they predated me.” The value of disposable artifacts less than 100 years old isn’t immediately apparent to most people, says Jim Rock, a pioneer of tin can studies who calls cans “the Rodney Dangerfield of archeology. They just don’t get any respect.” But the fact is “all archeology is garbage,” says Maxwell.
Dating cans gives archeologists a picture of modern consumption patterns — and patterns of ecological destruction — in the refuse tossed on highways and the strata of trash found in construction sites, landfills, and even ancient dig sites, where dating beer cans can tell archeologists when earlier trespassers might have arrived, removed or altered artifacts, and left their trash behind. Maxwell, who has recently downsized his collection from 4500 to 1700 cans to save space, admits that a narrow focus on the beer can takes a special combination of skills.
“Collectors are a fabulous resource for academics,” he says. “These are the guys who do the grunt work” — the endlessly curious citizen scientists of archaeology. “I can’t think of anyone else who would do that except someone who is obsessive about what it is that they are collecting.” In Maxwell, the obsessive collector and rigorous academic just happened to come together to produce the definitive guide. (See Beer Cans: A Guide for the Archaeologist online.) But even he has had to “face the question of what deserves to be archived and kept,” Nicola Jones writes at Sapiens. In discarding 3,000 of his own cans, most of them acquired through collectors online, he had to admit that “though the rusty cans were a part of history, they weren’t worth much to the rest of the world.”
At the time of his death in 2018, Anthony Bourdain was quite possibly the most famous cook in the world. Without question he held the title of the most famous cook-traveler, a status resting primarily on No Reservations and Parts Unknown, the television shows he hosted on the Travel Chanel and CNN, respectively. But it all began with A Cook’s Tour, which the Food Network originally broadcast in 2002 and 2003. That series, Bourdain’s very first, took him from Japan to Morocco to Mexico to Australia to Thailand — and through many points in between — in search of the world’s most stimulating eating experiences.
During the launch phase of his rise to fame (after decades of restaurant work and years of writing, an effort that first produced a couple of food-themed murder-mystery novels), Bourdain managed to tap into a new wave of gastronomic interest then rising in America. He did so with a street-smart sense of humor that appealed even to viewers with no particular investment in the world of cooking and dining, as long as they had an interest in the world itself. With A Cook’s Tour, he took food television out of the kitchen — way out of the kitchen — and over the eighteen years since its conclusion, the series’ influence has become so pervasive as almost to be invisible. Anthony Bourdain may be gone, but parts of his personality live on in every high-profile traveler out there cooking, eating, and getting lost today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
According to the current research, caffeine, “contributes much more to your health than it takes away.” These words come from a thinker no less vigilant about the state of food-and-drink science than Michael Pollan, and perhaps they’re all you feel you need to know on the subject. In fact, you’re probably taking in some form of caffeine even while reading this now. I know I’m doing so while writing it, and this, according to the Pollan-starring Wired video above, gives us something in common with the central figures of the Enlightenment. “Isaac Newton was a big coffee fan,” says Pollan, and Voltaire “apparently had 72 cups a day. I don’t know quite how you do that.”
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the Industrial Revolution also owe much to the intellectual and commercial churn of the coffee house, an institution that emerged in 17th-century London. “There were coffee houses dedicated to literature, and writers and poets would congregate there,” says Pollan.
“There was a coffee house dedicated to selling stock, and that turned into the London Stock Exchange eventually. There was another one dedicated to science, tied to the Royal Institution, where great scientists of the period would get together.” Consumed in dedicated houses or elsewhere, the “new, sober, more civil drink was changing the way people thought and the way they worked.”
The relevant contrast is with alcohol, once an element of practically all beverages in Europe. Before caffeine got there, “people were drunk or buzzed most of the day. People would have alcohol with breakfast” — children included, since it was still healthier than contaminated water. This custom hardly encouraged clear, linear thought; Diderot, Pollan tells us, wrote the Encyclopédie while drinking coffee, but imagine the result, if any, had he been drinking wine. More than a quarter-millennium later, we have solid evidence that caffeine “does improve focus and memory, and the ability to learn,” if at the cost of a decent night’s sleep. Not that this seems to have bothered coffee-pounding Enlightenment thinkers: what’s a little tossing and turning, after all, when there’s a worldview to be revolutionized?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
Americans may be accustomed to camping out in cafes with their laptops for hours, but Italian coffee bars are fast-paced environments where customers buzz in for a quick pick me up, then right back out, no seat required.
It’s the sort of efficiency the Father of the Modern Advertising Poster, Leonetto Cappiello, alluded to in his famous 1922 image for the Victoria Arduino machine (below).
Let 21st-century coffee aficionados cultivate their Zenlike patience with slow pourovers. A hundred years ago, the goal was a quality product that the successful businessperson could enjoy without breaking stride.
As coffee expert James Hoffmann, author of The World Atlas of Coffee points out in the above video, the Steam Age was on the way out, but Cappiello’s image is “absolutely leveraging the idea that steam equals speed.”
That had been the goal since 1884, when inventor Angelo Moriondo patented the first espresso machine (see below).
The bulk brewer caused a stir at the Turin General Exposition. Speed wise, it was a great improvement over the old method, in which individual cups were brewed in the Turkish style, requiring five minutes per order.
This “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage” featured a gas or wood burner at the bottom of an upright boiler, and two sight glasses that the operator could monitor to get a feel for when to open the various taps, to yield a large quantity of filtered coffee. It was fast, but demanded some skill on the part of its human operator.
As Jimmy Stamp explains in a Smithsonian article on the history of the espresso machine, there were also a few bugs to work out.
Early machines’ hand-operated pressure valves posed a risk to workers, and the coffee itself had a burnt taste.
Milanese café owner Achille Gaggia cracked the code after WWII, with a small, steamless lever-driven machine that upped the pressure to produce the concentrated brew that iswhat we now think of as espresso.
Stamp describes how Gaggia’s machine also standardized the size of the espresso, giving rise to some now-familiar coffeehouse vocabulary:
The cylinder on lever groups could only hold an ounce of water, limiting the volume that could be used to prepare an espresso. With the lever machines also came some some new jargon: baristas operating Gaggia’s spring-loaded levers coined the term “pulling a shot” of espresso. But perhaps most importantly, with the invention of the high-pressure lever machine came the discovery of crema – the foam floating over the coffee liquid that is the defining characteristic of a quality espresso. A historical anecdote claims that early consumers were dubious of this “scum” floating over their coffee until Gaggia began referring to it as “caffe creme,“ suggesting that the coffee was of such quality that it produced its own creme.
There’s an unmistakable element of coffee making as theater here… but also, a fascinating demonstration of physical principles in action.
Vintage vacuum pot collector Brian Harris breaks down how the balancing siphon works:
Two vessels are arranged side-by-side, with a siphon tube connecting the two.
Coffee is placed in one side (usually glass), and water in the other (usually ceramic).
A spirit lamp heats the water, forcing it through the tube and into the other vessel, where it mixes with the coffee.
As the water is transferred from one vessel to the other, a balancing system based on a counterweight or spring mechanism is activated by the change in weight. This in turn triggers the extinguishing of the lamp. A partial vacuum is formed, which siphons the brewed coffee through a filter and back into the first vessel, from which is dispensed by means of a spigot.
(Still curious? We direct you to Harris’ website for a lengthier, more eggheaded explanation, complete with equations, graphs, and calculations for saturated vapor pressure and the approximate temperature at which downward flow begins.)
The coffee from a syphon can best be described as “crystal clear,” with great purity of flavor and aroma and no bitterness added by the brewing process.
If you do invest, be sure to up the coffee snobbery by telling your captive audience that you’ve named your new device “Gabet,” in honor of Parisian Louis Gabet, whose 1844 patent for a counterweight mechanism kicked off the balancing siphon craze.
He writes in the preface that these recipes are intended to provide “musical interludes for the salivary glands,” warning readers that “no one should use this novel for a cookbook. Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her library anyway.”
So with that caveat in mind…
Early on, the narrator/titular character, née Rudy Waltz, shares a recipe from his family’s former cook, Mary Hoobler, who taught him “everything she knew about cooking and baking”:
MARY HOOBLER’S CORN BREAD
Mix together in a bowl half a cup of flour, one and a half cups of yellow corn-meal, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and three teaspoons of baking powder.
Add three beaten eggs, a cup of milk, a half cup of cream, and a half cup of melted butter.
Pour it into a well-buttered pan and bake it at four hundred degrees for fifteen minutes.
Cut it into squares while it is still hot. Bring the squares to the table while they are still hot, and folded in a napkin.
Barely two paragraphs later, he’s sharing her barbecue sauce. It sounds delicious, easy to prepare, and its placement gives it a strong flavor of Slaughterhouse-Five’s“so it goes” and “Poo-tee-weet?” — as ironic punctuation to Father Waltz’s full on embrace of Hitler, a seeming non sequitur that forces readers to think about what comes before:
When we all posed in the street for our picture in the paper, Father was forty-two. According to Mother, he had undergone a profound spiritual change in Germany. He had a new sense of purpose in life. It was no longer enough to be an artist. He would become a teacher and political activist. He would become a spokesman in America for the new social order which was being born in Germany, but which in time would be the salvation of the world.
This was quite a mistake.
MARY HOOBLER’S BARBECUE SAUCE
Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender.
Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder.
Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.
Rudy’s father is not the only character to falter.
Rudy’s mistake happens in the blink of an eye, and manages to upend a number of lives in Midland City, a stand in for Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s hometown.
His family loses their money in an ensuing lawsuit, and can no longer engage Mary Hoobler and the rest of the staff.
Young Rudy, who’s spent his childhood hanging out with the servants in Mary’s cozy kitchen, finds it “easy and natural” to cater to his parents in the manner to which they were accustomed:
As long as they lived, they never had to prepare a meal or wash a dish or make a bed or do the laundry or dust or vacuum or sweep, or shop for food. I did all that, and maintained a B average in school, as well.
What a good boy was I!
EGGS À LA RUDY WALTZ (age thirteen)
Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach.
Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg.
Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups.
Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese.
Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees. Serves three: the papa bear, the mama bear, and the baby bear who cooked it—and who will clean up afterwards.
By high school, Rudy’s heavy domestic burden has him falling asleep in class and reproducing complicated desserts from recipes in the local paper. (“Father roused himself from living death sufficiently to say that the dessert took him back forty years.”)
LINZER TORTE (from the Bugle-Observer)
Mix half a cup of sugar with a cup of butter until fluffy.
Beat in two egg yolks and half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind.
Sift a cup of flour together with a quarter teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Add this to the sugar-and-butter mixture.
Add one cup of unblanched almonds and one cup of toasted filberts, both chopped fine.
Roll out two-thirds of the dough until a quarter of an inch thick.
Line the bottom and sides of an eight-inch pan with dough.
Slather in a cup and a half of raspberry jam.
Roll out the rest of the dough, make it into eight thin pencil shapes about ten inches long. Twist them a little, and lay them across the top in a decorative manner. Crimp the edges.
Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about an hour, and then cool at room temperature.
A great favorite in Vienna, Austria, before the First World War!
Rudy eventually relocates to the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti, which is how he manages to survive the — SPOILER — neutron bomb that destroys Midland City.
Here is a recipe for chocolate seafoams, courtesy of one of Midland City’s fictional residents:
MRS. GINO MARTIMO’S SPUMA DI CIOCCOLATA
Break up six ounces of semisweet chocolate in a saucepan.
Melt it in a 250-degree oven.
Add two teaspoons of sugar to four egg yolks, and beat the mixture until it is pale yellow.
Then mix in the melted chocolate, a quarter cup of strong coffee, and two tablespoons of rum.
Whip two-thirds of a cup of cold, heavy whipping cream until it is stiff. Fold it into the mixture.
Whip four egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the mixture.
Stir the mixture ever so gently, then spoon it into cups, each cup a serving.
Refrigerate for twelve hours.
Serves six.
Other recipes in Rudy’s repertoire originate with the Grand Hotel Oloffson’s most valuable employee, headwaiter and Vodou practitioner Hippolyte Paul De Mille, who “claims to be eighty and have fifty-nine descendants”:
He said that if there was any ghost we thought should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.
We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.
But he could, he could.
HAITIAN FRESH FISH IN COCONUT CREAM
Put two cups of grated coconut in cheesecloth over a bowl.
Pour a cup of hot milk over it, and squeeze it dry.
Repeat this with two more cups of hot milk. The stuff in the bowl is the sauce.
Mix a pound of sliced onions, a teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon of crushed pepper.
Sauté the mixture in butter until soft but not brown.
Add four pounds of fresh fish chunks, and cook them for about a minute on each side.
Pour the sauce over the fish, cover the pan, and simmer for ten minutes. Uncover the pan and baste the fish until it is done—and the sauce has become creamy.
Serves eight vaguely disgruntled guests at the Grand Hotel Oloffson.
HAITIAN BANANA SOUP
Stew two pounds of goat or chicken with a half cup of chopped onions, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Use two quarts of water.
Stew for an hour.
Add three peeled yams and three peeled bananas, cut into chunks.
Simmer until the meat is tender. Take out the meat. What is left is eight servings of Haitian banana soup.
Bon appétit!
The recipe that closes the novel is couched in an anecdote that’s equal parts scatology and epiphany.
As a daughter of Indianapolis who was a junior in high school the year Deadeye Dick was published, I can attest that Polka-Dot Brownies would have been a hit at the bake sales of my youth:
POLKA-DOT BROWNIES
Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly.
Cool to room temperature.
Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla.
Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks.
Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan.
Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes.
Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.
Enjoy, in moderation of course.
I was wearing my best suit, which was as tight as the skin of a knackwurst. I had put on a lot of weight recently. It was the fault of my own good cooking. I had been trying out a lot of new recipes, with considerable success. — Rudy Waltz
Maybe your interest in Japan was first stoked by the story of the seventeenth-century shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his campaign to unify the country. Or maybe it was Japanese food. Either way, culinary and historical subjects have a way of intertwining in every land — not to mention making countless possible literary and cultural connections along the way. For the curious mind, enjoying a Japanese meal may well lead, sooner or later, to reading Japan’s oldest cookbook. Published in 1643, the surviving edition of Ryori Monogatari (variously translated as “Narrative of Actual Food Preparation” or, more simply, “A Tale of Food”) resides at the Tokyo National Museum, but you can read a facsimile at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library.
Translator Joshua L. Badgley did just that in order to produce an online English version of the venerable recipe collection. In an introductory essay, he describes his translation process and offers some historical context as well. Ryori Monogatari was written early in the era of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had been founded by the aforementioned Ieyasu.
“For the previous 120 years, the country had been engulfed in civil wars,” but this “Age of Warring States” also “saw the first major contact with Europeans through the Portuguese, who landed in 1542, and later saw the invasion of Korea.” The foreigners “brought with them new ideas, and access to a new world of food, which continues to this day in the form of things like tempura and kasutera (castella).”
Consolidated by Ieyasu, Japan’s subsequent 250-year-long peace “saw an increased emphasis on scholarship, and many books on the history of Japan were written in this time. In addition, travel journals were becoming popular, indicating various specialties and delicacies in each village.” The now-unknown author of Ryori Monogatari seems to have gone around collecting recipes that had been passed down orally for generations — hence the sometimes vague and approximate instructions. But unusually, note publishers Red Circle, the book also “includes recipes for game at a time when eating meat was viewed by most as a taboo.” In it one finds instructions for preparing venison, hare, boar, and even raccoon dog.
Your fascination with Japan might not have begun with a meal of raccoon dog. But Ryori Monogatari also includes recipes for sashimi, sushi, udon and yakitori, all eaten so widely around the world today that their names no longer merit italics. Taken together, the book’s explanations of its dishes open a window on how the Japanese ate during the Edo period, named for the capital city we now know as Tokyo, which lasted from 1603 to 1863. (In the video just above, Tasting History vlogger Max Miller makes a typical bowl of Edo noodles, based on a recipe from the 1643 cookbook.) “From the mid-Edo period,” says the Tokyo National Museum, “restaurants began to emerge across Japan, reflecting a new trend toward enjoying food as recreation.” By the late Edo period, an era captured by ukiyo‑e master Hiroshige, eating out had become a national pastime. And not so long thereafter, going for Japanese food would become a culinary, historical, and cultural treat savored the world over.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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