Kaldi noticed his goats dancing after eating red berries. It is the origin story of coffee and it was invented eight hundred years later.
The Lucky Goat holds a 4.9 from a hundred and nine people, charges twenty to thirty pounds, and is – as far as the Prat can establish – named after the most famous goat in the history of drink.
Kaldi
The story is Ethiopian, and it is told everywhere, and it goes like this.
A goatherd called Kaldi noticed that his goats, having eaten the red berries of a certain shrub, became so energetic that they would not sleep at night. They were, in the usual telling, dancing.
He tried the berries himself. He felt wonderful. He took them to a monk, who disapproved and threw them on the fire – and the roasting beans produced a smell so extraordinary that the monastery raked them out of the embers, dissolved them in water, and discovered that they could now stay awake through the night office.
It is a lovely story. It explains the roasting, the brewing, and the entire monastic and clerical association of coffee in one economical narrative.
And it appears in no source before 1671.
The dating problem
Coffee cultivation and drinking in the Yemen and the Horn of Africa is documented from at least the fifteenth century, and the plant is native to Ethiopia, and the practice is certainly older than the written record.
The Kaldi story was first written down by a Maronite scholar in Rome, in Latin, in 1671 – which is more than two hundred years after coffee is documented and a great deal longer after it was actually being drunk.
It is a folk etymology. It is exactly the same species of thing as the Infanta de Castile, and Dom Perignon tasting the stars, and the Prince of Wales feathers coming off a blind king at Crecy.
A thing exists. Nobody wrote down where it came from. And a hundred or five hundred years later somebody produces a beautiful explanation, and it wins, because a goat that dances is a better story than several centuries of undocumented agricultural practice.
The other coffee house
Which is a five-minute walk from here.
We wrote in the first batch about the Jamaica Wine House, which stands on the site of London’s first coffee house – opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee, who hung a picture of his own head over the door and advertised the drink as a cure for gout, scurvy and hypochondriac winds.
Within fifty years there were five or six hundred coffee houses in London, and Lloyd’s and the Stock Exchange grew out of them, and the entire financial machinery of the square mile you are drinking in was assembled by men sitting in them.
Because of a shrub. Which a goat may or may not have found.
The bar
A 4.9 from a hundred and nine people is one of the highest scores in four postcodes on a sample we are prepared to accept.
Small room. Short list. Somebody who knows. It has never failed once in four hundred and sixteen articles.
Verdict
Excellent. Go, and drink to Kaldi, who did not exist, and to his goats, who did not dance.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about British people is we invented irony to say true things safely. This stops being safe.