Thackeray (1811–1863) must have suffered many tea and coffee disappointments. In the Kickleburys on the Rhine he asks: "Why do they always put mud into coffee aboard steamers? Why does the tea generally taste of boiled boots?"
In Arthur's, A. Neil Lyons has preserved for all time the atmosphere of the London coffee stall. "I would not," he says, "exchange a night at Arthur's for a week with the brainiest circle in London." The book is a collection of short stories. As already recorded, Harold Chapin dramatized this picturesque London institution in The Autocrat of the Coffee Stall.
In General Horace Porter's Campaigning with Grant, we have three distinct coffee incidents within fifty-odd pages; or explicitly, see pages 47, 56, 101; where, deep in the fiercest snarls of The Wilderness campaign we are treated to:
General Grant, slowly sipping his coffee ... a full ration of that soothing army beverage.... The general made rather a singular meal preparatory to so exhausting a day as that which was to follow. He took a cucumber, sliced it, poured some vinegar over it, and partook of nothing else except a cup of strong coffee.... The general seemed in excellent spirits, and was even inclined to be jocose. He said to me, "We have just had our coffee, and you will find some left for you." ... I drank it with the relish of a shipwrecked mariner.
One of the first immediate supplies General Sherman desired from Wilmington, on reaching Fayetteville and lines of communication in March, 1865, was, expressly, coffee; does he not say so himself, on page 297 of the second volume of his Memoirs?
Still more expressly, towards the close of his Memoirs, and among final recommendations, the fruit of his experiences in that whole vast war, General Sherman says this for coffee:
Coffee has become almost indispensable, though many substitutes were found for it, such as Indian corn, roasted, ground and boiled as coffee, the sweet potato, and the seed of the okra plant prepared in the same way. All these were used by the people of the South, who for years could procure no coffee, but I noticed that the women always begged of us real coffee, which seemed to satisfy a natural yearning or craving more powerful than can be accounted for on the theory of habit. Therefore I would always advise that the coffee and sugar ration be carried along, even at the expense of bread, for which there are many substitutes.
George Agnew Chamberlain's novel Home contains a vivid description of coffee-making on an old plantation, and could only have been written by a devoted lover of this drink. Gerry Lansing, the American, has escaped drowning in the river, and is now lost in the Brazilian forest. He finds his way at last to an old plantation house:
A stove was built into the masonry, and a cavernous oven gaped from the massive wall. At the stove was an old negress, making coffee with shaky deliberation.... The girl and the wrinkled old woman made him sit down at the table, and then placed before him crisp rusks of mandioc flour and steaming coffee whose splendid aroma triumphed over the sordidness of the scene and through the nostrils reached the palate with anticipatory touch. It was sweetened with dark, pungent syrup and was served black in a capacious bowl, as though one could not drink too deeply of the elixir of life. Gerry ate ravenously and sipped the coffee, at first sparingly, then greedily.... Gerry set down the empty bowl with a sigh. The rusks had been delicious. Before the coffee the name of nectar dwindled to impotency. Its elixir rioted in his veins.
In the Rosary, Florence L. Barclay has a Scotch woman tell how she makes coffee. She says: