This peculiar principle (theine) is also found in the leaves of the Ilex Paraguayensis, or Paraguay tea, used in South America, as a beverage.
"Good black tea contains of theine from 2.00 to 2.13 per cent.
Coffee-leaves contain of theine from 1.15 to 1.25 per cent.
Paraguay tea contains of theine from 1.01 to 1.23 per cent.
The coffee-berry a mean of 1.00 per cent.
"Besides the theine and the essential oils, which latter give the aroma of the plants, there is contained in both coffee and tea a certain amount of difficultly soluble vegetable albumen, and in the latter, especially, a large quantity of tannin. Roasting renders volatile the essential oil of the coffee-berry. The tea-leaf, infused for a short time, parts with its essential oil, and a small portion of alkaloid, (theine,) a good deal of which is thrown away with the grounds. If it stands too long, or is boiled, more indeed is got out of it, but an astringent, disagreeable drink is the result. The boiling of coffee extracts all its oil and alkaloid too, and, when it is drunk with the grounds, allows the whole nutriment to be available. Even when strained, it is clearly more economical than tea."
Roasted coffee is a powerful deodorizer, also. This fact is familiarly illustrated by its use in bar-rooms; and it might be made available for other purposes.
The cost and vast consumption of coffee and tea have made the inducements to adulterate them very great. The most harmless form, is the selling of coffee-grounds and old tea-leaves for fresh coffee and tea. There is no security in buying coffee ready-ground; and we always look at the neat little packages of it in the grocers' windows with a shudder. Beans and peas we have certainly tasted in ground coffee. The most fashionable adulteration, and one even openly vaunted as economical and increasing the richness of the beverage, is with the root of the wild endive, or chicory. Roasted and ground, it closely resembles coffee. It contains, however, none of the virtues of the latter, and has nothing to recommend it but its cheapness. The leaves of the ash and the sloe are used to adulterate tea. They merely dilute its virtues, without adding any that are worth the exchange.
The coffee-tree is a native of Ethiopia or Abyssinia. Bruce tells us that the nomad tribes of that part of Africa carry with them, in crossing deserts on hostile expeditions, only balls of pulverized roasted coffee mixed with butter. One of these as large as a billiard-ball keeps them, they say, in strength and spirits during a whole day's fatigue, better than a loaf of bread or a meal of meat. The Arabs gave the first written account of coffee, and first used it in the liquid form. Burton, in his "Anatomy of Melancholy," mentions it as early as 1621. "The Turks have a drink they call coffee, (for they use no wine,)—so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter, which they sip up as warm as they can suffer, because they find by experience that that kind of drink, so used, helpeth digestion and procureth alacrity."
The coffee-tree reaches a height of from six to twelve feet, and when fully grown much resembles the apple-tree. Its leaves are green all the year; and in almost all seasons, blossoms and green and ripe fruit may be seen on the same tree at the same time. When the blossom falls, there springs from it a small fruit, green at first, red when ripe, and under its flesh, instead of a stone, is the bean or berry we call coffee. "It has but recently become known by Europeans that the leaves of the coffee-plant contain the same essential principle for which the berries are so much valued. In Sumatra, the natives scarcely use anything else. The leaves are cured like tea. And the tree will produce leaves over a much larger habitat than it will berries." Should the decoction of the leaves prove as agreeable as that of the berry, we shall have a much cheaper coffee; though it remains to be proved that they contain the essential oil as well as the cafeine.
The coffees of Java, Ceylon, and Mocha are most esteemed. The quantities produced are quite limited. Manila and Arabia together give less than 4,500 tons. Cuba yields 5,000 tons per annum; St. Domingo, 18,000; Ceylon and the British East Indies, 16,000; Java, 60,000; and Brazil, 142,000. Yet, in 1774, a Franciscan friar, named Villaso, cultivated a single coffee-tree in the garden of the convent of San Antonio, in Brazil. In the estimates for 1853, we find that Great Britain consumes 17,500 tons; France, 21,500; Germany, (Zollverein), 58,000; and the United States, about 90,000 tons. It is worth remarking how small is the comparative consumption of tea in France. The importation of tea for 1840 was only 264,000 kilogrammes (less than 600,000 pounds).
In Asia, coffee is drunk in a thick farinaceous mixture. With us the cup of coffee is valued by its clearness. We generally drink it with sugar and milk. The French with their meals use it as we do,—but after dinner, invariably without milk (café noir). And we would suggest to the nervous and the dyspeptic, who do not want to resign the luxury of coffee, or to whom its effects as an arrester of metamorphosis are beneficial, that when drunk on a full stomach its effects upon the nerves are much less felt than when taken fasting or with the meals.
In the consumption of tea the United States rank next to Great Britain. Tea is the chief import from China into this country. The tea-plant flourishes from the equator to the forty-fifth parallel of latitude; though it grows best between the twenty-third and the twenty-fifth parallels. Probably it can be successfully cultivated in our Southern States. Mr. Fortune considers that all varieties of tea are derived from the same plant. Other authorities say that there are two species, the green and the black,—Thea viridis and Thea Bohea. This point is yet unsettled. Tea is grown in small, shrub-like plantations, resembling vineyards. As it is a national beverage, certain localities are as much valued for choice varieties as are the famous vintage-hills and slopes of Southern France. The buds and the leaves are used; and there are three harvestings,—in February, April, and June. The young, unfolded buds of February furnish the "Youi" and "Soumlo," or "Imperial Teas." These are the delicate "Young Hysons" which we are supposed to buy sometimes, but most of which are consumed by the Mandarins. Souchong, Congo, and Bohea mark the three stages of increasing size and coarseness in the leaves. Black tea is of the lowest kind, with the largest leaves. In gathering the choicer varieties, we are told on credible authority that "each leaf is plucked separately; the hands are gloved; the gatherer must abstain from gross food, and bathe several times a day." Many differences in the flavor and color of green and black teas are produced by art. Mr. Fortune says of green tea, that "it has naturally no bloom on the leaf, and a much more natural color. It is dyed with Prussian blue and gypsum. Probably no bad effects are produced. There is no foundation for the suspicion that green tea owes its verdure to an inflorescence acquired from plates of copper on which it is curled or dried. The drying-pans are said to be invariably of sheet-iron." We drink our tea with milk or sugar, or both, and always in warm infusion. In Russia, it is drunk cold,—in China, pure; in Ava, it is used as a pickle preserved in oil.