Via Flashbak.
When comes devotion? My first peek was at eight, as I loitered in the kitchen of a family friend, making the least of a sick day while she and my mother caught up. She saw me eyeing some of the marvels we didn’t have at home: “Would you like some?” “Yes, please.” She placed a cup of milk in the microwave—a gadget I had never operated, much less was allowed to touch. After the beep, she stirred in Folgers Instant and a healthy dose of sugar.
I sipped the tanned hide brew. My eyes widened; my veins clenched whisker thin; I found my first true friend. Asking for a cup soon became the method for my queer yearling self to wander into the edges of adult conversation: kaffeeklatsch, gossip, chisme, dish.
I suppose it really is addiction. But I’ve quit most of the other fun ones.
The secret of instant coffee is that, technically, it’s already been made once. Instant coffee has been roasted, ground, spray-dried and then freeze-dried. The resulting granules are packed into glass jars with low moisture and little oxygen to ensure that a cup of instant today and one a year from now will be equally underwhelming. What we lose in volatility, we gain in convenience.1
Instant granules are big even in places with historically deep coffee and tea cultures, although that’s most likely the result of Nestlé and the United States tag-teaming neo-imperial capitalism. Every morning I kid myself into thinking my French press filled with fair-trade dark roast has made a difference.2
As a teenager, I went through gallons of instant Cafe Bustelo in order to learn college algebra. We still didn’t have a microwave, so I would heat a large pot of water and pour it, near boiling, into a plastic tumbler stuffed with ersatz grounds. Whatever plastic compounds leached into my sludgy brew probably compounded the damage I did to my circadian rhythms, decades of anxious studying and insomnia that lasted through the end of the doctorate.
Maybe it’s all a deep ritual; I’ve quit most of the other fun ones.
This spring, when everything first grew eerily still, I bought Nescafé from the corner store. I had read about a recipe sweeping South Korea as people stayed indoors, and I figured a silly recipe could raise my spirits. I whisked the crystals with sugar and boiling water until they formed a droopy mousse, which I was instructed to flop onto iced almond milk. I obliged, hoping I discovered a new treat.
The drink was somehow both cloying and acrid, the same tongue-curling sensation I had when I last tried honeycomb candy. I put the whisk and sugar away and switched to lower-glycemic pandemic habits, like making yogurt and obsessively running around my neighborhood in a weighted vest. Still, I kept the jar of instant on my counter for the next several months, when work and dirty masks kept me from leaving the apartment.
It could be love. For better and worse.
Recipe
Normally I drink coffee black, but just humor me: Fill a coffee mug with milk. I don’t care what kind. Microwave until quite steamy. (This depends on how cheap your microwave is; for me, it’s two minutes.) Add a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee. I don’t care what kind. Add a couple spoons of sugar and stir. Breathe in and remember the last time you felt warmth glow on the back of your neck, in your shoulders. Take a sip, dial up an old judy, and talk some shit.
Via Amazon.
- R. J. Clarke, “Coffee (Instant),” in Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Academic Press, 2003), 1493–98; Rodolfo Campos Zanin et al., “Modulation of aroma release of instant coffees through microparticles of roasted coffee oil,” Food Chemistry 341 (March 2021).
- Yavuz Köse, “‘The fact is, that Turks can’t live without coffee…’: The introduction of Nescafé into Turkey (1952–1987),” Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 11 (August 2019); Susie Khamis, “‘It Only Takes a Jiffy to Make’: Nestle, Australia and the Convenience of Instant Coffee,” Food, Culture & Society 12 (209): 217–33; John M. Talbot, “The Struggle for Control of a Commodity Chain: Instant Coffee from Latin America,” Latin American Research Review 32 (1997): 117–35.
