All About Coffee

Coffee is “the stream in which we wash away our sorrows”—but how did the Arabic qahwah become the English word we know today? William H. Ukers begins with a cupful of extravagant praise and a word with a journey of its own.

In the early twentieth century, Ukers turns a worldwide gaze on coffee: its cultivation, trade, customs, and place in daily life. He traces the drink’s name from Arabic through Turkish into the many spellings and sounds adopted across Europe, weighing the arguments of writers, travelers, and scholars. His subject is at once a fragrant plant, a precious commodity, a daily ritual, and a source of spirited debate. Even the familiar word on a coffee cup carries traces of distant encounters—and not every clue points in the same direction. What can a word’s changing sounds reveal about coffee’s passage from one culture to another?

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