An insoluble problem (from Punch, 1855)

COMMON THINGS FOR THE COMMISSARIAT.

It has been judiciously suggested that everybody's education should include the knowledge of common things. A little of this science would hare saved the lives of many brave men in the Crimea. What a pity it is that the War Office authorities and the Commissariat should never have been taught any of it, as they evidently have not! Had they possessed the slightest knowledge of common things amongst them, would the troops in the Crimea ever have had served out to them rations so irrational as green coffee? Wheat or beans in the crude state the human grinders may deal with, the human stomach being very empty, and nothing better at hand to fill the void. But green coffee berries for an article of food, and no means of utilizing them but jaw teeth!—What did the Commissariat and the War Office imagine that the molars would do with such materials! Wise teeth indeed it would take to dispose of diet of that sort. That this mistake may not again occur, and by way of example to matrons, housewives, and others capable of instructing Downing Street and the Horse Guards in the knowledge of the things above alluded to, a few remarks may be offered with respect to one of those things, namely, that same common thing,

COFFEE.

Coffee is not produced by nature in the form in which it occurs to us at the breakfast table. It is not found in a liquid state. It is a berry, that is to say, a quantity of berries; the fruit of a plant cultivated in Arabia and the West Indies, and in the Conservatory at Kew Gardens. Plenty of Coffee may be seen in every grocer's shop in London and the United Kingdom. Heaps of it are piled in the shop windows; and the berries of which these heaps of coffee consist are some of them brown and others green.

Green coffee differs from green tea. Green tea is fit to make the beverage called tea, but green coffee is not fit to make that denominated coffee. Green tea is not simply the verdure of the tea plant, unmanufactured. But green coffee is merely raw coffee; it is coffee unprepared for use. When prepared for use, coffee is brown. It is prepared for use by being roasted. The roasting is not performed with a spit, or by means of a jack. The green coffee berries are put into iron cylinders which are turned by steam engines over a fire. By this operation they are browned. The roasting of coffee is a business of itself, requiring large premises, and much labour. It might indeed, at a pinch, and after a fashion, be managed in a frying-pan. In the absence of any frying-pan, a fire-shovel, perhaps, would serve. But without steam engine, without cylinder, without frying-pan, without fire-shovel, it would hardly be possible to roast coffee anyhow, and without fire, certainly, coffee could be roasted nohow. Coffee, therefore, should be issued to troops ready roasted, and not green, as they are always unprovided with steam-engines and cylinders, and generally almost as badly off for frying-pans and fire-shovels.

When coffee, by the process of roasting, has been changed from green to brown, it has to undergo another operation, before it can be employed in concocting the drink which bears its name. Those Ministers and Commanding and Commissariat Officers, whose breakfast-rooms are not too highly elevated above their kitchens, may sometimes, of a morning, have remarked a rumbling sound ascending from the culinary regions. This is occasioned by the manoeuvre of grinding the coffee, which is effected with a hand-mill. Hand-mills also not abounding in armies, and coffee-grinding being essential to coffee-making, mere coffee-berries, though roasted and not green, afford the soldier a nearly insoluble problem, even when he can get enough hot water for the solution of his coffee: which is not always the case. The pestle and mortar may present a substitute for the mill, but in yielding them to a mess, the surgeon runs the risk of getting himself into a scrape. Nutmeg-graters would answer better; but where there are no nutmegs the graters must needs be few. Coffee, therefore, should be supplied to soldiers not only ready roasted, but ready ground: if issued whole, it should be accompanied with a sufficiency of graters; and if issued green, as well as whole, there should likewise be an equally liberal distribution of fire-shovels or frying-pans, as well as plenty of coke or charcoal.

Here some account of that common thing, the making of coffee, might be added; but the knowledge of this is not necessary to the authorities, who are not encamped before Sebastopol: for them it will suffice to know what are the conditions indispensable for that purpose. Let them only give the soldier the possibility of making his coffee, and the soldier will make it well enough, no doubt.