At Home - Bill Bryson [97]
A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India, quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do, because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them—so it was thought—because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant passage in six volumes of dense and secret scribblings, not to mention what gave him the inspiration to look there in the first place, are mysteries that are some distance beyond being answerable.
By chance, an Oxford scholar, the Reverend George Neville, master of Magdalen College, saw Macpherson’s passing reference to Pepys’s diaries and grew intrigued to know what else might be in them. Pepys after all had lived through momentous times—through the restoration of the monarchy, the last great plague epidemic, the Great Fire of London of 1666—so their content was bound to be of interest. He commissioned a clever but penurious student named John Smith to see if he could crack the code and transcribe the diaries. The work took Smith three years. The result of course was the most celebrated diary in the English language. Had Pepys not had that cup of tea, Macpherson not mentioned it in a dull history, Neville been less curious, and young Smith less intelligent and dogged, the name Samuel Pepys would mean nothing to anyone but naval historians, and a very considerable part of what we know about how people lived in the second half of the seventeenth century would in fact be unknown. So it was a good thing that he had that cup of tea.
Normally, like most other people of his class and period, Pepys drank coffee, though coffee itself was still pretty novel in 1660. Britons had been vaguely familiar with coffee for decades but principally as a queer, dark beverage encountered abroad. A traveler named George Sandys in 1610 grimly described coffee as being “blacke as soot, and tasting not much unlike it.” The word was spelled in any number of imaginative ways—coava, cahve, cauphe, coffa, and cafe, among others—before finally coming ashore as coffee in about 1650.
Credit for coffee’s popularity in England belongs to a man named Pasqua Rosee, Sicilian by birth and Greek by background, who worked as a servant for Daniel Edwards, a British trader in Smyrna, now Izmir, in Turkey. Moving to England with Edwards, Rosee served coffee to Edwards’s guests, and this proved so popular that he was emboldened to open a café—the first in London—in a shed in the churchyard of St. Michael Cornhill in the City of London in 1652. Rosee promoted coffee for its health benefits, claiming that it cured or prevented headaches, “defluxion of rheums,” wind, gout, scurvy, miscarriages, sore eyes, and much else.
Rosee did very well in his business, but his reign as premier coffee-maker didn’t last long. Sometime after 1656, he was compelled to leave the country “for some misdemeanour,” which the record unfortunately doesn’t specify. All that is known is that he departed suddenly and was heard of no more. Others swiftly moved in to take his place. By the time of the Great Fire, London’s eighty-plus coffeehouses had become a central part of the life of the city.
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving.