‘The Espresso is Italy’s Gift to the World’

At the Times Higher Education , Graham Farmelo offers an ode to espresso and, along the way, he gives his readers an enjoyable history lesson:

The joy of the espresso, gastronomy’s magic bullet, is that it delivers the essence of the roasted coffee bean in all its subtle complexity without the slightest frill. No other liquid can match the sensual jolt it provides as it passes between the lips . . . .

For me, espressos are essential if I’m to be productive. The late Hungarian number theorist and espresso-addict Paul Erdos once described mathematicians as machines that convert coffee into theorems. An exaggeration, of course, but we know what he meant. Espressos can also hinder creativity, reducing those who overindulge to fretful, unproductive, quivering wrecks.

How Voltaire managed to consume 50 cups of coffee a day yet still write so much is beyond me. His compatriot, the novelist Honore de Balzac, wrote about the dangers of imbibing too much caffeine in “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”, where he mentions that the composer Gioachino Rossini, another coffee lover, had a series of overdosing binges, each followed by a period of cold turkey.

“Coffee is an affair of 10 or 20 days,” Rossini remarked, “just about the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera.”