CAPPUCCINO ON MY MIND (2024)

bedtime, and I don't drink coffee socially, instead of beer or whisky. I

like beer and whisky.

But I love coffee -- thick, dark, rich coffee of the sort most

Americans never taste; the stuff fancy restaurants call cappuccino,

cafe' au lait, cafe' con leche, espresso and so forth, and charge $2 or

more a cup. But fancy restaurants almost never make it right, which

infuriates me.

I became obsessed with good coffee some years ago in Spain, where no

matter what dumpy little cafe you go into, you order coffee and get

something that stands up and salutes you.

Actually, it goes back further than that, to the old Fisherman's

Cafe in Key West, Fla., where the shrimpers went for breakfast before

the sun rose over the aquamarine shallows leading to the Gulf of Mexico.

Cafe Bustelo was the brand there, served half and half with

evaporated milk straight from the can, which made a concoction so rich

it was a milkshake, but the coffee was still strong enough you could

feel it down to the pit of your stomach, rich and smoky and aggressive.

Breakfast for a shrimper was a couple of cups of that cafe with a

hunk of hot, buttered Cuban bread, which you dipped in the coffee. Now

that was a morning meal.

By contrast, the average cup of coffee you get in a restaurant in

America, even a good restaurant, is dishwater. That TV ad that shows

some dumbheads getting duped into drinking instant coffee at a fancy

restaurant and not knowing the difference? I believe that ad.

So for some years, I've known what I wanted out of a cup of coffee,

but I haven't been able to get it. Not at restaurants, where the average

coffee chef is a 17-year-old kid whose idea of haute cuisine is an

eclair, and not at home, though it wasn't for lack of trying.

I bought one of those Latin-American coffee pots that unscrews in

the middle, where the boiling water bubbles up to the top and then

dribbles down through the grounds. What a mess! I bought a German

electric coffee grinder and ground my own beans. I bought one of those

single-cup filter things and dripped the boiling water through drop by

drop, Chinese water-torture style. I bought Spanish beans, Mexican

jumping beans, Hawaiian beans, French roast. But nothing came close to

the humblest, stand-up cafes of Key West, Madrid or Paris.

Then a year ago I spent some time in Australia, fully expecting the

people there to have all the culinary sophistication of their forebears

from Great Britain. You know, mushy grey peas, corn flakes with

dehydrated milk ...

But it turns out the little town of Fremantle in West Australia was

settled largely by southern Italians who came there to fish for crayfish

during the Depression. And these people take their coffee seriously.

At Gino's, Papa Luigi's, Primavera, the Lido and a dozen other al

fresco dining spots, if you asked the counterman for "cappuccino

strong," you were testing his manhood, and he felt no remorse testing

yours back. The coffee you got made your the hair on your belly tingle.

In Australia, if you really wanted to make the day go bright, you

ordered a "short black," which was the first tablespoonful of black,

primordial ooze that dribbled out like crankcase oil when the espresso

machine was initially engaged. My Australian hero, Peter Newstead, used

to order a double short black after dinner, which used two doses of

espresso. Sick man, Peter.

Watching the transplanted Italian countermen of West Australia

working the levers and dials of the cappuccino machines, turning out

that powerful brew, reminded me of the feeling I had at age 16 when I

watched a guy take off down the Meadowbrook Parkway on an Indian

motorcycle in a cloud of blue smoke and a roar. I knew then that one day

I would run a big motorcycle if it killed me, which of course it nearly

did.

And I knew in Fremantle that one day I would somehow own and operate

a cappuccino machine and twist those steam dials and turn those handles

like the big boys, looking blissfully bored.

So a year ago my wife bought me an electric Italian cappuccino maker

for $135, on sale at the coffee store in Annapolis Mall. This thing

lacked the majesty of the mighty three-spigot monsters in Freo, but it

had a certain heft.

It came with a full set of incomprehensible instructions, the most

baffling of which was a warning not to "keep the water in the reservoir

longer than a certain period," and of course I have tried my level best

to comply.

This machine is like a young bird dog. It has wonderful moments, but

you're never quite sure what it's going to do next. One day the steam

pressure went wild and blew the spigot, a half-pound hunk of stainless

steel, right out of its fitting, spraying fine-ground French roast

across the kitchen in a mist and shattering the glass cup that had been

gathering my morning espresso.

One day an air bubble found its way into the water tube and the

creature began braying a horrible bray, like a sucking chest wound, and

refused to drip. I wound up bleeding the system by mouth.

Half of cappuccino is hot steamed milk, and half the pleasure of that

is the noise of the steamer. On my machine, some days you can hear the

kids beating each other's brains out in the next room; some days you

couldn't hear a pipe bomb going off under your feet.

As with any coffee machine, it's hard to get consistency, even if

you use the machine every morning, as I do. But slowly it and I are

learning each other's ways. I like my coffee strong. It's been hard

getting the balance. I went to smaller cups, and now on weekdays, using

fine-ground French roast, I can turn out a single dose of cafe' con

leche, in a four-ounce cup, that will pin your ears back. That and three

slices of fresh bread from Nick the Greek baker in Eastport was as close

to Key West and Spain as I thought you could get.

Then, the boss sent me off to the Winter Olympics, and at a joint

called the Corner House cafe in Calgary the man pulled out a bag of

Italian espresso coffee beans of the excelsior variety, slippery with

oils. He grinned a pusher's grin, ground the beans and said, "You

haven't tasted coffee until you've tried this."

He worked his cappuccino-maker like Quasimodo ringing the bells at

Notre Dame, and the coffee left me breathless.

I've been on the prowl since for excelsior, with no luck so far in

the specialty shops around Annapolis. But I have a vision, brothers and

sisters, of coffee beans as black as pitch: A double short-black of

Italian excelsior, in my own kitchen. Heaven!