Part Two

Coffee is the most abused drink that I know. It’s unusual to get a really good cup in any but the most expensive restaurants, and then it’s often wildly over-priced. Actually, coffee is one of the most versatile of drinks—as I hope to show you. It is also a good ingredient in many recipes.

It’s interesting, I think, that coffee originally came from Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, if you prefer.

In England the coffee shop is a very old institution. In the eighteenth century there were hundreds of coffee houses in London, and it was fashionable for men to meet in a coffee house to talk business or politics over a cup of steaming hot coffee. Indeed, so much politics were talked that a proclamation banning coffee shops was issued, and for a while they were all closed.