| The Coffee Break According to an old Turkish proverb, coffee should be "black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love." As a brew, coffee has been around for centuries. But in this country, taking a daily break to drink it is a more recent phenomenon.This week on Present at the Creation, NPR's ongoing series on the origins of American icons, Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg traces the history of the coffee break.The world's first coffee break, Stamberg reports, "probably took place before 1000 A.D. in Abyssinia (today's Ethiopia). Legend has it that a goatherd named Kaldi noticed his goats dancing around on their skinny hind legs. Then he noticed the goats had eaten some red berries. Kaldi tried the berries; he started dancing, too; and so coffee break dancing was born!"From those beginnings, Stamberg says, the story of coffee is "long and global." Arabians in the 13th century used the roasted, brewed beans to ease menstrual cramps. The first coffee shop opened in 15th-century Constantinople, where the Turks thought the drink was an aphrodisiac. By the mid-1600s, coffee replaced beer as New York City's favorite breakfast drink. In the 1700s in Leipzig,... |
