Family & Education
Susan Reuben: My coffee habit is causing chaos
Susan Reuben needs coffee in the morning before she can function. But how can she make that coffee?
May 24, 2018 09:36
Susan Reuben needs coffee in the morning before she can function. But how can she make that coffee?
May 24, 2018 09:36My family has a whole range of hobbies and interests, but we all share one talent: breaking cafetières. We break them all the time. During one memorable period last year, three were broken in three weeks by three different people. I know I should switch to the plastic or metal varieties, but somehow they don’t appeal.
I can’t explain why this happens to other people in the house — but for my own part it’s because I’m completely unable to make coffee if I don’t have enough caffeine inside me. This is a Catch 22 situation equivalent to failing to find one’s glasses due to not having them on.
First thing in the morning is the worst, when my need for a caffeine fix is the most acute. Even on days when I don’t actually break the cafetière, the whole process is a fiasco. I flounder round the kitchen, declaring in a panicky voice that the coffee tin has disappeared, until someone points out that I’m holding it, then going to pour the kettle and realising I haven’t switched it on. I once managed to plunge the cafetière, then pour the whole lot over my cereal.
If my kids ask me questions at breakfast time, they’re used to me saying, “I don’t know — I haven’t had any coffee”. My 12-year-old has grown so accustomed to this that if I ask him a question he can’t, or doesn’t wish to answer, he has taken to replying, “I don’t know — I’ve never had any coffee.”
My love affair with coffee began on winter mornings at Cambridge, when I used to huddle in front of the gas fire in my room in the early morning, with a mug of “instant”. Cambridge is notoriously freezing in winter-time and my college house had no central heating. Getting out of bed was therefore a brain-jangling challenge.
So, once the fire was switched on and the coffee made, there was something delicious about sitting crossed-legged in front of the glowing bars, feeling the caffeine begin to course through my veins and getting in a bit of pre-breakfast essay prep. There on the floor, with my mug of Nescafé and a volume of Sartre or Dante, I felt fabulously — if erroneously — grown up and sophisticated.
Once I’d graduated, I decided it was time to acquire a taste for “proper” coffee and I set out to get used to the flavour, so much stronger and more bitter than the pretend stuff I was used to. It was a pretty stupid move really, because now I’m a fully fledged coffee snob — spending a small fortune on my habit.
Many coffee-lovers are evangelical about their preferred brewing method. They talk about the process in emotive terms, referring to the “ritual” of preparation, the “choreography”. Some even speak of it as a meditative act.
I feel that these people are not sufficiently hooked on the stuff, or they couldn’t possibly be taking so much pleasure from the act of creating it. My tendency to stagger around swearing and breaking things while trying to make it marks me out, I feel, as a true coffee aficionado.
My husband Anthony, who hates coffee, has nevertheless learned that the points he gets from making it for me far exceed the amount of effort involved— and are at least tripled if it’s brought to me in bed. He refuses to actually plunge the cafetière, though — he says he thinks it’s going to attack him.
Addiction has its drawbacks, and never more so than on holiday where the urgency of finding the first cup of the day can cause all sorts of traumas.
In a café in Italy, for example, I asked for “una latte” in my best Italian accent. The waiter duly brought me a cup of milk, because of course “latte” is simply the Italian for “milk”. I then had to ask him sheepishly if he’d add some coffee to it. I can still recall the look he gave me.
Another time, in a holiday apartment in Granada, I found in the cupboard one of the classic octagonal “Moka pots”. For three days, I experimented with putting boiling water and ground coffee into different bits of it. (This was in the pre-YouTube tutorial days.) Finally, I worked out you had to put it on the hob.
Having finished writing the above, I went to help our oldest with his barmitzvah practice. Then I heard a crash from the kitchen. Anthony had broken a cafetière.
I fear it may be time to embrace a new coffee-making method. Or the more sensible solution would be to give it up altogether — but that’s never going to happen. And, as vices go, I feel it’s better than going out on a booze- and drug-fuelled bender and forgetting to come home for days on end. I hardly ever do that.
@susanreuben
