Coffee and Goats

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Once upon a time, perched on the hillsides of the coast of South Yemen in Arabia, there was a monastery of devout Muslims which derived its main resources from a flock of goats. The goats gave them milk and meat, and provided leather which they took to town to sell. One day the goatherd complained to the Imam (head of the Muslim community) that sometimes, and against their usual nature, his beasts remained awake and lively all night. The Imam suspected that this wakefulness was the result of whatever the goats were grazing. He visited the flock to investigate, and saw some shrubs with firm, glossy leaves, which the goats had ravaged. They had also eaten the fruits: small, red berries like cherries with not much flesh and a large kernel. The holy man cut a branch still bearing berries, and back in the monastery he searched his library for a treatise on botany, for the members of these Arab religious communities were very learned men. He found no reference to the berry, but on reflection, it occurred to him that the shrubs seemed to have been growing in regular rows, as if they had once been planted by the hand of man. They must have reverted to the wild long ago, although it could be seen that they had once been aligned in an orchard. But how could an orchard have been planted in this remote spot? It turned out, however, that a colony of black people said to have come from the country of Kaffa in Abyssinia had once lived in those parts. Islamic tradition gave their greatest queen the name of Balkis. The Imam read that:

This queen, having heard tell of the Jewish king Soliman (Solomon), left her country of Sheba, the old name of that region, to visit him. When she came home she bore a son, called Menelik, who later returned to Abyssinia to introduce Judaism there, and that cult became Coptic Christianity. The Sabaeans, because of their geographical position at the entrance to the Red Sea, long had a monopoly of trade in spices, gold, and also the copper necessary to make brass, for they had fabulous mines somewhere. They vanished from history two centuries before the Prophet Mohammed, may his name be praised, revealed the truth to the faithful.

It seemed likely that the Sabaeans had brought some of the plants they most valued from Kaffa, their native land in Africa. What, then, was the use of the trees which had so excited the goats, always supposing the subjects of the Queen of Sheba really had planted them or their descendants? To find out, the Imam decided to try eating them. The red berries, eaten raw with their kernels crushed, tasted unpleasant to any palate but a goat’s. So he boiled the crushed fruits, which did not bulk very large, apart from their kernels, and bravely drank the purée-like infusion. It was nothing special.

Suddenly remembering that cereals were sometimes roasted to make them more appetizing, he put some of the kernels in the embers. They gave off an exquisite aroma, even though they now looked like goat droppings. He crushed them with a stone and made a liquid gruel of them; it looked like tar, and as it was still bitter he sweetened it with a little honey. A few moments after tasting this mixture, his heart began beating so fast that he had to lie down, but instead of falling asleep he felt extraordinarily lucid. His brain, becoming as active as in his youth, was teeming with brilliant ideas. The Imam, a man of considerable intellectual powers in any case, became even more knowing. He watched through the night, feeling as if he could embrace the universe, and did not even feel tired next morning. At the midnight hour of prayer, he was the only man in the monastery to be truly wide awake; as usual, the other members of the community dragged themselves wearily to their devotions, muttering. But when the Imam gave them some of his decoction the same miracle happened to them all. It was subsequently discovered that the tree from Kaffa also had therapeutic qualities against fevers. In their gratitude, the monks gave the brew the name of kawah, a triple play on words, meaning ‘that which excites and causes the spirits to rise’, and also referring to the name of Kawus Kai, a great Persian king who, according to legend, had been able to free himself from his terrestrial weight and fly to the heavens by the mere power of thought. 

Source: A History of Food | Coffee and Politics by Toussaint-Samat, Maguelonne, pp. 532-534.

The different types of Arabic coffee with the Hejazi / Najdi golden coffee seen on the left and the Levantine black "qahwah sādah" (plain coffee) on the right

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