The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830) | Hacker News Reader

The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)

quod.lib.umich.edu

125 pointsptio37 comments

"This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain."

That is some damn fine writing there.

You left off the better part of the story!

On the drink [finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach] mentioned above.

"I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thoughthe’d been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache."

The translation is apparently inaccurate, it would be better as "and took to his bed, which he guarded like a bride".

both ways, i completely miss the meaning.

A married man's wife resides in a married man's bed

However, they may be different married men.

The original is "garder le lit comme une mariee". It's hard to know as it's semi-colloquial 1830's French, but I would understand it in the sense of 'he stayed in bed like a honeymooner'.

Jesus, what I would give to be able to compose like that.

Also, possibly the start of a design document for an interesting indie game.

Also the words that follow the above:

"From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink -- for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

Balzac's galley proofs seem like a testament to a life of dedicated heavy coffee drinking:

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/collections.asp?id=365

I recommend starting at the top and working your way down piece by piece, over coffee of course. Lots and lots of coffee. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31565/31565-h/31565-h.htm

And if you like the translations, I should add that most were completed by four women. In particular, Ellen Marriage who published under the name James Waring.

http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/translations/

I think Balzac was on to something. :-) I like how he quotes Brillat-Savarin. Others are here. [0] My favorite is the one that kicks off Iron Chef, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are."

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jean_anthelme_br...

Allez cuisine!

Allez caffeine!

An entire carafe of 500mg of dark roast in 1L of water.

In French: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_des_excitants_mode...

Thanks. Also worth noting that it contains essays on wine and tobacco.

It was curious to see the reference to cold-brew coffee. I didn't even know it was a thing until a couple of days ago when I saw this article in a freebie newspaper:

How to Make cold brew coffee at home http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/foodanddrink/how-to-make...

Ah! I think this was recently reprinted in the "Intoxication" issue of Lapham's. Very interesting essay in a very interesting magazine. That one also turned me on to the "Coffee Cantata" of Bach:

http://coldewey.cc/post/49474192760/bach-ei-wie-schmeckt-der...

Lapham's is second to none at what they do. I wish it were more available online. Some of their web productions are beautiful, but it's so hit and miss what you can find on their site that I eventually gave up.

Agree. I just subscribed, damn the expense. A wonderful publication like that is well worth a bill a year if you ask me.

How much of this is pseudo science?

Surprisingly, much of it appears to be accurate. Tannins can cause irritation, though more notably of the bladder (interstitial cystitis) than the stomach, and brewing finer coffee at lower temperature does indeed result in a lower tannin content. Ingesting coffee beans does in fact cause some indigestion via increased production of stomach acid, as well, and in addition to all of this caffeine works by the following two neural mechanisms:

* it blocks the adenosine receptor type 1, whose primary function is to decrease blood pressure and heart rate in preparation for sleeping

* it blocks the glycine receptor, whose primary purpose is to slow muscle contraction (strychnine also blocks this receptor, albeit far more strongly...)

So the claims about the effects of coffee are, well, surprisingly accurate, though finding most of this information was hard and I wish I had peer-reviewed sources:

http://www.ic-network.com/patient-resources/diet/diet-introd...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/02/11/espresso_why_is_...

http://www.livestrong.com/article/476658-the-effects-of-eati...

Google Scholar seems to be getting slowly less useful; repeated searches for information on brewing methods turned up mostly information about roasting methods.

"I'm not an addict, I'm a connoisseur!"

"Last night a meth connoisseur took my wallet and my mobile phone!"

Funny, this is the same year the Mormon church was founded. They abstain from the consumption of coffee.

For French speakers out there, here's the original version: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_des_excitants_mode...

Balzac's story makes me wonder if I'll make it to 50. I'm not quite at his level, but I'm not far behind.

Do you have thick black hair and an impregnable constitution? Notably though, he was pretty focused on the toxic qualities of tannins, but most recent investigations seem to go the other way (mild antioxidant, mild anticancer effects). Maybe your zealous drinking will take you well past 50?

He refers to a french "cafiot" coffee ?? I googled it but couldn't find anything. Anyone knows what it is ?

The text described that term not as a type of French coffee, but as the term the French used to describe Turkish-style coffee.

http://www.languefrancaise.net/bob/detail.php?id=5998

First part means: "Bad coffee made with chicory." Turkish coffee is made with chicory

Turkish coffee is a method of preparation, but I have never known it to be made with chicory. Perhaps you meant cardamom?

I've only ever had coffee made with chicory in New Orleans. Somewhat ironically, supposedly we have the French to thank for that - http://www.cafedumonde.com/coffee :-)

... and coffee made with chicory (mix the ground coffee with ground roast chicory and brew normally) has a very interesting flavor... I find roast chicory much closer in taste to coffee than other roast grains used as coffee substitutes—it has a fairly coffee-like bitterness, for example—but it has its own unique flavor as well, with a nice vegetal/grassy sweetness to offset the bitterness.

You can mix it in any proportion that suits you; I like straight roast chicory too...

It's something not everybody likes, but well-worth trying.

[One warning though: I've found that if you let too much chicory go through a coffee-grinder (e.g. if you mix the beans with the chicory before grinding), it can gum up the grinding burrs...]

Does anyone have a plain text transcription? I'm having trouble reading that scan.

There's a 'format' option in the top left, you can select text/image/pdf. Here's it in text form[0]

[0]-http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mqrarchive/act2080.0035.002/10?v...

Since even their "text" view is a pain, here is the document in full plaintext and readability formats (all credit due to Monsieur Balzac):

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=RjDr7g8Z

https://www.readability.com/articles/mxgfhgbh

Do check out the "CAFFEINATED" documentary as well while you're at it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OecTZBjFvw#t=259

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