Message #17228

[Heba E. Husseyn]

Wa’Salam and sure me sis    I can make it 2 average to short paragraphs.  One paragraph would be a bit of a crunch for a topic as vast as this.

A little confusion as to where coffee was discovered first,  Ethiopia or Yemen.  Whichever, it was around the 6th century.  Then it spread to the rest of the Arabian peninsula.  At this time coffee beans were crushed and eaten and its berries used for medicinal purposes.   From the Arabian Peninsula coffee spread to Turkey and the rest of the northern Middle East across Syria, Palestine and Lebanon.   By 1400s it began being consumed as a drink throughout the Muslim world.   The new discovery of roasting seeds for a better taste began a century earlier, in the 1300s.   In early 1500s when the Ottoman governor Ozdemir Pasha was posted in Yemen,  he fell in love with coffee.   When he returned to Istanbul, it became the most popular drink for guests of his palace.   An additional area within the palace was turned into a “coffee shop” and  the palace coffee-maker was one of the most important members of the palace staff.  Raw coffee beans were roasted in thick based pans, then ground (pounded with heavy stone slab often used in medieval kitchens as there were no electric blenders or grinders), and then boiled and filtered in jugs.
   
Europeans got to know about coffee as late as 1615 when merchants from Venice discovered it in the coffee shops of Istanbul and carried it to Europe.  But Italy’s first coffee shop opened much later in 1640.  Prior to that coffee was sold at roadsides by lemonade vendors.   Then the Parisians and Londoners brought coffee in their cities in mid 1640s and early 1650s, respectively.   Coffee rapidly began to open in major European cities and also served as venues for social gathering.   A little later in the early 1700s, European voyageurs  sailing around the globe in search of treasures (often looted) setup coffee plantations in various parts of south-east Asia.



An early coffee shop, Istanbul.