[THE INFLUENCE OF WHOLESOME DRINK.]
[Concluded.]
Coffee is the berry of an evergreen tree, which grows to a height of about twenty feet, and which is largely cultivated in Arabia, Ceylon, Jamaica, and the Brazils. The berry is plucked when sufficiently ripe, and carefully stored away. It is principally composed of a sort of hard paste or meal, similar to that of the almond or bean, which is destined by nature to form the earliest nourishment of the young germ contained in the seed. When this meal is exposed to strong heat, it is partly turned into the fragrant flavor, which is familiar to all drinkers of coffee. Hence coffee is always roasted before it is employed in the preparation of beverage. The process is best accomplished by placing the berries in a hollow cylinder of iron, kept turning rapidly round over a clear fire until they put on a light chestnut color, when they require to be cooled quickly by tossing them up into the air. Roasted coffee contains, besides its fragrance, the white nerve food already alluded to in speaking of tea, a remnant of the nutritious meal, unaltered by the roasting, and a slightly astringent matter. Its nature is, therefore, singularly like to that of tea, and its action on the living frame is precisely the same. When drunk in moderation, coffee supports and refreshes the body, and makes the food consumed with it go further than it otherwise would. Coffee is, upon the whole, less astringent than tea; it also contains only half the quantity that tea has, weight for weight, of the active nerve food. Hence it can be taken stronger than tea, and so has more of the other nourishing ingredients in any given bulk. A cup of strong coffee generally holds about the same quantity of the active nerve food as a weak cup of tea.
As with tea, so with coffee; it requires to be prepared differently, accordingly as the object is, to get from it the finest flavor or the greatest amount of nourishment. The most delicious coffee may be made by using a tin vessel, called a percolator, having a false bottom at mid-height, drilled full of fine holes, and a spout coming off from beneath the false bottom. Finely-ground coffee is to be pressed and beaten down firmly upon the false bottom, and then boiling water is to be poured over it through a kind of coarse cullender, so arranged as to break its descent into a boiling shower. The hot water thus gently rained down on the coffee then drains gradually through it, carrying all the finer parts and flavors with it into the vessel beneath, but leaving behind the coarser matters. For the convenience of consumers, coffee is now commonly removed from the roaster at once into a mill driven by steam, and is there ground while still hot. It is then pressed out from the mill directly into tin cases prepared to receive it, these being immediately closed very carefully. By these means the coffee is sent out, ready for use, with all its most excellent qualities clinging about it. Three drachms of ground coffee of this quality are abundantly sufficient to furnish two small cups of a most delicious beverage.
When quantity of nourishment, rather than fineness of flavor, is the thing desired, the ground coffee should be placed in a clean dry pot standing over the fire, and be kept there until thoroughly hot, being stirred constantly, so that it may not burn. About five grains of carbonate of soda should then be added for each ounce of coffee, and boiling water be poured on, the whole being closely covered up and allowed to stand near the fire, without simmering, for some time. When about to be used, it should either be gently poured off into cups, without shaking it, or it should be strained through a linen cloth into another pot. An ounce of coffee employed in this way is sufficient for the preparation of two pints of strong nutritious drink.
A small evergreen tree grows in the West Indies, Mexico, and Peru, which bears a large fruit something like a melon. In this fruit there are a great number of seeds resembling beans. When the fruit is ripe, it is plucked from the tree and split open, and the seeds are picked out and dried in the sun. After these beans have been roasted in an iron cylinder, in the same manner as coffee, they, too, become bitter and fragrant, and are turned into what is known as cocoa. To form cocoa nibs, the husk of the roasted bean is stripped off, and the rest is broken up into coarse fragments. In the preparation of chocolate, the cocoa nibs are ground up and turned into a sort of paste, by admixture with sugar and spices. The unhusked bean is also crushed between heavy rollers, and made into a coarser kind of paste, with starch and sugar, and is then sold in cakes.
Cocoa contains about the same quantity of the nerve-food ingredient as tea, and besides this it also contains a nutritious meal. More than half its weight is, however, made up of a rich oily substance, nearly resembling butter in nature. When cocoa is prepared by stirring the paste up in boiling water, all these several ingredients are present in the drink. It is then as nourishing as the very strongest kind of vegetable food, and scarcely inferior to milk itself. It indeed is richer than milk in one particular; it contains twice as much fuel substance, or butter, and if the nerve-food ingredient be taken into the reckoning, it is scarcely inferior in supporting power. On account of its richness it often disagrees with persons of weak digestion, unless it be prepared in a lighter way, that is, by simply boiling the cocoa nibs in water, and mixing the beverage produced with enough milk to reduce its great excess of oily principle. Cocoa serves at once as an agreeable and refreshing beverage, and as a highly nutritious food for healthy and hard-working people. It has in itself the excellence of milk and tea combined.
The beverages which are also prepared by soaking the seeds of vegetables in hot water, but which are not then drunk until a further change of the nature of partial decay has been produced in them, are of a very unlike character to those which have been hitherto under consideration. Although there are several different kinds of this class, they all stand together under the family name of beer. Now this much must at once be said for these beverages. There is in all of them both flesh-making substance and fuel-substance. The first gives to the liquor its body, and the second confers its sweetness. The barley-corn contains the same kinds of ingredients as the wheat-grain, and by the operation of malting the starch is chiefly turned into sugar. If a gallon of strong ale be boiled over a fire, until all the more watery parts are steamed away, there will be found at the bottom of the vessel rather more than a quarter of a pound of dry remainder. This is flesh-making substance, and sugar, which were originally taken out of the malt. If a gallon of milk were treated in the same way, there would be found nearly a pound of similar dry substance. Strong beer therefore contains about one-third part as much nourishment as an equal quantity of milk. When beer is drunk, its watery parts are at once sucked from the digesting-bag into the supply-pipes, to be poured through the body with the blood; this is how beer quenches the thirst. The thicker portions are pushed on through the sluice-gate of the stomach in a digesting state, and are, in fact, treated in every respect as ordinary food.