“In a word, coffee is the drunkard’s settle-brain, the fool’s pastime, who admires it for being the production of Asia, and is ravished with delight when he hears the berries grow in the deserts of Arabia, but would not give a farthing for a hogshead of it, if it were to be had on Hampstead Heath or Banstead-Downs.”
Thomas Tryon (1634-1703), The Good Hous-Wife Made a Doctor (1692)
“Coffee as drunk in England, debilitates the stomach, and produces a slight nausea … it is usually made from bad Coffee, served out tepid and muddy, and drowned in a deluge of water.”
William Kitchiner (1775-1827)
“As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”
Honore de Balzac (1799-1859)
“It is true, says Liebeg, that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea and coffee; and daily experience teaches us that, under certain circumstances, they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal functions, but it is an error, certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and It is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them.”
Isabella Beeton (1861)
‘It is the duty of all papas and mammas to forbid their children to drink coffee, unless they wish to have little dried-up machines, stunted and old at the age of twenty….] once saw a man in London, in Leicester Square, who had been crippled by immoderate indulgence in coffee; he was no longer in any pain, having grown accustomed to his condition, and had cut himself down to five or six cups a day.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
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