Café

The coffee shrub, Coffea arabica, reached France from the Ottoman world and the Levant through Marseille and Paris in the seventeenth century, and the drink passed from curiosity to habit over the following hundred years. The café as a public room, where coffee is drunk standing at the counter or seated at a table, became one of the fixed institutions of French urban life, and Larousse Gastronomique treats the drink both as a beverage and as an ingredient of the kitchen and the pâtisserie.

Café is the infusion of roasted, ground beans of Coffea arabica, or of Coffea canephora (robusta), in water just below the boil. In the French service the principal forms are the café express, a short, concentrated cup drawn under pressure; the allongé, the same extraction lengthened with hot water; the noisette, an express with a little milk; and the café crème and café au lait, in which hot milk is the greater part of the cup. Filter coffee, made by pouring water slowly over ground coffee in a paper or cloth filter, is the domestic method and the one Larousse describes in detail.

Café is drunk at the end of a meal, after the cheese and dessert, and at breakfast with bread, butter and the viennoiseries, the croissant above all. Its bitterness and light acidity cleanse the palate of fat and sugar, which is the structural reason it closes a rich meal and balances a buttered pastry. In the kitchen it flavours the crème au beurre, the éclair and the glaçage of the opéra, where its bitterness restrains the sweetness of the cream.