Read Online Various Flavors of Coffee by Anthony Capella - Free Book Online

manner, almost as if one freedom begets another.“I was referring to your thoughts.”
    “Oh, I try not to have any of those. I find they get in the way of my fine feelings.”
    “What does that mean, exactly?” she asked with a frown.
    “I have absolutely no idea. It is much too clever for me. I find that at least three-quarters of what I say goes completely over my own head.”
    “Then you must be too clever by three-quarters.”
    “Do you know, if I had said that it would have been quite amusing.”
    “But a woman, of course, cannot be witty.” “Not when she is as beautiful as you are.”
    She breathed smoke into the air. “You are flirting with me again, Robert.”
    “No, I am flattering you, which is not the same thing at all. Women are an ornamental gender. It is the secret of their success.” She sighed.“I doubt if I will ever be as ornamental as you. And unlike an ornament, I do not intend to sit on a mantelpiece gathering dust. Now, shall we put these out and get back to work? Our palates will be no good to us, but perhaps we could make some
    notes.”
    It was a great shame, I reflected, that Emily Pinker was a respectable middle-class bourgeois and not a bohemian or a whore. There was something combative, even challenging, about her manner which I was finding quite irresistible.

    What I learned, in those first weeks at Pinker’s offices, was something that is quite obvious to me now: the absolute treachery of words.Take a word like medicinal. To one person, it might mean the sharp tang of iodine; to another, the sickly-sweet smell of
    chloroform; to a third, the rich, spicy warmth of a balsam or cough mixture. Or buttery. Is that a positive attribute, or a negative? To which my answer is: when it describes the moist feel that freshly ground coffee beans should have between the fingers—like crumbled cake—it is a positive; when it describes the feel of a brewed coffee in the mouth—viscous, thick, the opposite of watery— it is also good; but when it describes a taste, as when a coffee is over-rich in oils, verging on rancid, it becomes undesirable. Our job was thus to define not only the tastes of our coffees, but also the words and phrases we used to describe them.
    Or take these words: scent, fragrance, bouquet, aroma, odor, nose. Do they mean the same thing? If so, why? Lacking the words that described different kinds of smell—the smell of the beans, the aroma of the grind, the bouquet of the coffee in the cup—we appor-tioned existing words according to our needs. In this way we soon left ordinary language behind, and began to speak in a private dialect of our own.
    I learned something else, too: that our perceptions become more substantial when we start to examine them. Pinker had spo-ken of my palate becoming trained, an obvious enough expression, except that I had at the time no inkling of what it really meant. Day by day I became more confident in my judgments, more precise in my terms. I seemed to enter a state of synaesthesia, that condition in which all the senses become interlinked, so that scents become colors, tastes become pictures, and all the stimuli of the physical world are felt as strongly as emotions.
    Does that sound fanciful? Consider these tastes. Smoke is a fire crackling in a pile of dead leaves in autumn; a chill in the air, a crispness in the nostrils. Vanilla is warm and sensual, a spice island warmed by a tropical sun. Resinous has the thick pungency of pine cones or turpentine. All coffees, when considered carefully, have a faint smell of roast onions: some, without a shadow of a doubt, also have soot, fresh linen, or mown grass. Some will yield the fruity,
    yeasty smell of freshly peeled apples, while others have the starchy, acidic taste of raw potato. Some will remind you of more than one flavor: we found one coffee that combined celery and blackberries, another that married jasmine and gingerbread, a third that matched chocolate with the elusive fragrance