My Coffee Souvenir by James Chatto
We asked James Chatto, Van Houtte ambassador and author to share a short coffee story with us. His story brings us to a special and personal moment in his life.
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Thinking back to my childhood, I can still remember the smell of the coffee my mother made. I grew up in a small house in Chelsea, in the centre of London, where my parents often entertained their friends and colleagues from the theatre. My mum was a brilliant cook and her dinner parties were always joyful and classy occasions, her long lunches apt to last deep into the afternoon. All of them ended with a coffee ritual after everyone had left the table and moved back to the sitting room to gather comfortably around the fire. She brought in the Cona from the kitchen and set it down on the coffee table (where else?) beside a tray of dainty demitasses, tiny spoons, a little jug of cream and a bowl of large, hard, brown sugar cubes that looked like topaz and crunched like candy.
The Cona was a magical device (we weren’t allowed to touch it) – two great polished glass globes, one above the other, connected by a glass tube, elegantly suspended in a swooping black claw over a spirit lamp that burned with a supernatural blue flame. Ground coffee went into the top globe, hot water into the other. Then the alchemy began. While the grown-ups talked about goodness-knows-what, my brother and I would sit and stare at the Cona, waiting for the water to start to bubble and fret and then, inexplicably, to rise up the tube into the upper globe, surging and spilling like a geyser onto the coffee. We watched the black tide creep up the glass while the aroma of it permeated the room – so dark and exotic, the quintessential scent of the adult world. Then the flame was extinguished and the coffee, with a gurgle and a sigh, emptied itself back into the lower vessel. Only sorcery could explain it.
My mother filled the tiny cups. My brother and I were allowed to carry them, very slowly and carefully, to our guests. And eventually the day came when she half-filled a demitasse and handed it to me. Did I want cream and sugar? Of course not. I wanted it black, the way my parents drank their coffee. Oh, that first sip was a shock! So startlingly bitter! So pungently strong! Nothing like cocoa or tea. I wanted very much to like it, to see why all the grown-ups took such pleasure in the ritual, but… Let’s just say it took a few more years before I truly grasped it.
But I have no doubt those first childhood sips helped form my Coffee Profile. Make mine as Bold & Woodsy as possible... And brewed with a little magic, if you please.
