Coffee
having yet another mug of lifegiving coffee, i was thinking about the fact that my home country, sweden, has the world's highest or second highest annual per capita consumption of coffee, alternating with finland depending on what year you look at.
my maternal grandmother certainly has done her part to improve consumption statistics. she's too old to drink much now, but she used to drink so much coffee that she couldn't even sleep at night unless she had a cup of coffee just before bedtime - she'd get the shakes without the caffeine, don't you know. i'm not that addicted to beautiful sister caffeine, but knowing i'd better get my daily fix, i used to have 10 to 15 cups a day. i've cut down, though. my paternal grandfather had his own peculiarity - he used to pour his coffee first in the cup, and then from the cup onto the saucer, put a lump of sugar between what teeth he had left, and sift the coffee through the sugar lump which slowly disintegrated and sweetened the coffee. imagine the noise he made slurping his coffee down - it always fascinated me seeing him drink it like that. then i read in a book on caffeine that that was the way people used to drink coffee in the 1700's, when it just started making its way around europe and up to sweden. that's living cultural history for you.
anyway, where i come from, we're taught to drink coffee while still in our diapers, or almost. i began when i was four or five, or, rather, my mother put me on track when i was about that age. seeing all the adults always drinking that mysterious brew, i wanted to try it out and see what was so magic about it that made people sit down and talk for hours on end, laughing happily, discussing politics, or sports, or photography, or whatever. it is a social thing, after all, except for your morning coffee, which is a very private affair, and i soon learned that you rarely just have a cup of coffee. you need someone to have it with you, so you can talk about something while drinking it, even if it is just the weather or yesterday's gossip.
in any case, my mother would pour about one-third cup of coffee and then another one-third of milk. in this almost-cafe au lait, she would mash a cinnamon roll, which every kid loves anyway - it is an absolutely fabulous snack freshly out of the oven. with some melting butter on the back and accompanied by a glass of really cold full-fat milk it is just the best.
then you get used to it, and you start drinking it regularly. when you're about 15, you begin to learn that there is stronger drink than coffee to be had, and you learn that old men like to mix vodka, something we drink almost like russians in sweden, in the coffee. you either stir it into the coffee, or you pour it on the back of a spoon held just at surface level, so that you get a cool cap of vodka on top of the hot coffee. brilliant.
it is said that the way to measure the amount of vodka that goes into the stir-in variety is to place a coin at the bottom of the cup, and then pour coffee until you can no longer see the coin. you then pour vodka in the coffee until the coin is visible again. that is my preference and an amazing drink when you're out skating or skiing on a cold winter's day.
but you can't have too much or you may find that you'll have trouble finding your way home.