You begin with a Mr. Coffee, newly invented by the dad of your high school classmate Vince. For two decades you put Folgers in your drip machine, which at first is all that’s available and then all you can afford. But you grow to hate how the coffee in the glass carafe smells over the course of the next hour or two, cooking on the hot plate.
You decide to go retro and use the old GE percolator your parents brought out for parties. Percolated coffee doesn’t evaporate or scorch, and you can drink hot cups all morning as you write, coffee being as essential to the scribe as fingers. Your chef friends make fun of you for claiming your boiled, overcooked coffee is good. You become a percolator evangelist anyway.
But you get divorced, move to New York City, and leave the percolator behind (along with most of your previous life—a thousand cookbooks, wedding silver, a cherished sauté pan).
You have dinner with a woman, also a writer, who lives in your neighborhood. You become lovers, then marry. She has her own coffee cravings and decides to purchase a Japanese coffee machine that drips the coffee into a thermos. The coffee stays hot and does not boil or burn. You make it so strong it would be undrinkable without half-and-half. When you take the first sip, a deep contentment floods your body.
Your wife insists on monthly deliveries of Peet’s Major Dickason’s blend so that you are never without coffee. It is perhaps reason number twelve out of ten thousand you feel lucky you married her. It is delicious.
Every morning you bring mugs of Peet’s coffee back to bed for the two of you as you prepare for the morning’s writing. All is right with the world. It would not be so without the coffee, you think.
Eventually it occurs to you that all is right with the world, not because of the coffee, but because of the wife. You try not to confuse the two.
Author, journalist, and cook Michael Ruhlman and his wife, Ann Hood, own three Zojirushi coffee makers: one for New York City, one for Providence, and one for the road. Read his Substack at ruhlman.substack.com.
Thumbnail credit: Catherine Sebastian