Coffee

It was in Paris that coffee first met with the welcome which made its fortune. In 1669, a Turkish ambassador, an arrogant but sociable man, Soliman Mustapha Raca, who entertained a great deal, offered coffee to his Parisian guests. The embassy failed, but the coffee succeeded. Like tea, coffee was [257] thought to be a marvel remedy. A treatise on the Usage du caphé, du thé, et du chocolate which appeared anonymously in Lyon in 1671, and may have been by Jacob Spon, listed all the virtues attributed to the new drink:

It dries up all cold and damp humours, drives away wind, strengthens the liver, relieves dropsies by its purifying quality; sovereign equally for scabies and impurity of the blood, it revives the heart and its vi-tal beat, relieves those who have stomach ache and have lost their appetite; it is equally good for those who have a cold in the head. [...]

Perhaps the most picturesque or rather the most moving sight was the woman peddlers standing at street corners when the workmen went to work at daybreak. They carried the tin urns on their backs and served café au lait ‘in earthenware pots for two sous. Sugar was not much in evidence’. It was, however, enormously popular; the workmen ‘have found more economy, more sustenance, more flavour in this foodstuff than in any other. As a result, they drink it in prodigious quantities, saying that it generally sustains them until the evening. Thus they eat only two meals, a large breakfast, and beef salad in the evening’; which meant slices of cold beef with parsley, oil and vinegar..

—Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life (1979), pp. 256-57.