Italians in 1900 Never Drank Espresso - Here's What Nonna Really Drank

The little eight-sided coffee pot on your grandmother's stove was not invented until 1933. Your family left Italy before that. So what did they actually drink? This is the story of coffee in the towns of Campania — the province of Avellino, the province of Benevento, the Cilento, the province of Caserta — in the years when families were leaving for America. Not the coffee of the postcards. The coffee of a farmhouse kitchen with a fire in it. In this video: Why the moka pot could not have crossed the ocean with anyone, and how it really arrived in Italian-American kitchens forty years later, by mail and in suitcases. The cuccumella, the Neapolitan flip pot, and why most families in the hill towns did not own one either. Caffè d'orzo — barley coffee — and the generation of children who grew up believing they were drinking coffee when they were drinking roasted grain. How coffee was made in a village kitchen, step by step, on the embers, in a small pot with the grounds left to settle at the bottom. And why the last of it was never poured. The iron drum with a hand crank, the roasting done at home, and why every family in a town of eight hundred people had coffee that tasted slightly different from every other family's. What happened at the other end: the first cup of American coffee, the size of the mug, and why the complaint was never really stubbornness. The year the crema was born, and the reason your great-grandmother never once tasted an espresso as we know it today. Chicory, the Depression, the tins on the shelf of the Italian grocery, and the lemon peel argument that will not go away. Tell me in the comments: what town did your family come from, and what did the coffee in your grandmother's house smell like? Write the name of the town the way your family spelled it, even if you are not certain it is right. There are people down there from the same three or four towns as you. There always are.