There is a reason I put this picture here, rather than that of only a frothy stainless steel tumbler. South Indian coffee is a religion, and just as you don't understand much of any religion by merely visiting a temple, you don't understand our passion for coffee by just seeing the tumbler or even sipping our coffee a bit.
To make you understand how ingrained our passion is, let me tell you of a visit to Srirangapatna about 50 years ago. My mother was a traditional lady who did not even drink water taken from anywhere outside our home. But that day, after the amblings around the temple town, in the hot afternoon, she needed her coffee fix. Not knowing anybody in that place, not of course ever going to drink coffee in a restaurant, we bought coffee powder, a vessel(?), milk, sugar, and made coffee on the roadside by burning dry leaves and sticks. Finally my mother got her drink of a darkened suboptimal concoction from a blackened vessel, but that was enough of a fortifying fix to continue the trip.
Coffee is to us what soma rasa might be to gods or wine to nabobs. Or scotch and rum to soldiers and sailors. Or beer to Germans, Britishers and Aussies.
I recollect the heady aroma of coffee in the trade-fair grounds in Saba Saba Fair in 1976. That was my first trip abroad and I was representing Government of India in the Tanzania Fair. Like a homing bird, or Captain Haddock to his bottle, I ran towards where the coffee was brewing. It made my day to drink a strong brew, and my delight was to know how coffee was a passion all over Africa and Arabia. In fact they explained how East African economies sorely depended on coffee exports.
I confess my attendance at International conferences is somewhat motivated by the thought of those shiny copper coffee machine stalls that generous trade booths install, where you can get a fresh brew served by smiling attendants.
Some more evidence. Many years ago, when a Madrassi friend married a Delhi Punjabi girl, his mother packed all the pathos of her disapproval into a pithy question, "Can she make coffee?"
And my sister-in-law, who surely will remember this: a strappling teenager decades ago, she came rushing out of her hostel at Rukmani Devi's Kalakshetra on the first day, a picture of rude shock, shedding copious tears and exclaiming, "They don't serve coffee here!" Sagely advice alone didn't suffice, I had to take her and get her two ice-creams on Mount Road to make her stay back in her chosen dance school.
Coffee is more than anything else. It is only next to mother's milk for us.
I have found the American way of drinking 'Starbucks' watery, black, tepid coffee from large mugs totally incomprehensible. It's somewhat like a ritual that drains all feeling from a sacred experience and leaves behind only a nominal diluted remnant of the hoary tradition.
I find the ways of the Europeans who sip a spoonful of strong black coffee, sometimes laced with alcohol, also difficult to appreciate. Give me any time coffee with milk, and no sugar please! because I think it is sacrilegious to sweeten a drink with its unique taste straight from heaven. Make it from a fresh brew in a coffee filter, pour milk till it froths, and serve it in a tumbler or a cup. And make sure it is hot.
Wherever I have lived, in Hyderabad, Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Erlangen, Sydney, Singapore, Mysore, Bangalore....we first located the sacred spots where we could get good filter coffee powder. That determined our love for that place. It gave us after all meaning in life.
My dalliance with coffee machines, percolators, French presses, all have convinced me that there is only one right way- that of using a coffee filter. Of course even more fanatic purists say that coffee should be strained with a cloth. Well. That is how my father made coffee. And he drank it from a silver tumbler.
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