Consuming Interest

Coffee

By LESLIE ADRIAN T YING between the chasm of Oxford Street's

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chain stores and the north end of New Bond Street, South Molton Street, WI, has somehow managed to retain charm and individuality in an otherwise unlovely corner of London. It is full of quaint interest and good things. You will find the shop where a Mrs. Bowes-Lyon sells home-made jams; those excellent women of the Solid Fuel Advisory Council are there; and, above another doorway, you will find the insignia of a Royal corsetiere.

It is, howeVer, to Number 42 that I urge you to go and to indulge yourself in the pleasure of buying coffee from H. R. Higgins, Coffee-Man. Mr. Higgins, already discovered by Mr. Dimbleby and now rushed to Langham Place, or Lime Grove whenever coffee becomes news (`which is when- ever you journalists have nothing else to write about') is, you may have gathered, a character, a London particular.

He talks of good coffee in the way a wine mer- chant discusses vintage wines, and his customers respond with the same expertise. (`Half a pound of pure Santos,' says a housewife. 'Mysore, dark- roasted,' says a young Indian.) Yet there is a difference. The vintner goes as far as reverence : Mr. Higgins offers only respect. 'Consider,' he says, 'a banquet as music. Then wine is the soloist; coffee merely the accompaniment. A good cup of coffee should complement a meal but never dominate it.

The type of coffee we choose should depend on the meal. 'After a steak, a full-blooded burgundy and with the room full of cigar smoke, a palate is flagging. A small cup of bitter continental roast coffee is needed to revive it. But if there is a room full of beautiful women and there has been a delicate meal and possibly a good hock, then the coffee should be in a mild, muted key.'

The best coffees today come from Central and South America, and it is cheering to hear from Mr. Higgins that he has never sold more good coffee in forty years in the coffee, trade. For our improved coffee standards we owe everything, he believes, to the influence of Americans in Britain.

If you are a wine drinker, you will probably find a Costa Rica blend at 6s. 8d. a pound a good general-purpose coffee. You can get the best dark- roast Costa Rican for 9s. a pound. The highest quality coffee imported from Brazil today is Santos, and this costs about 7s. 8d. a pound. Most of these 'dollar coffees,' incidentally, are due to go down about sixpence a pound soon.

At 9s. a pound, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is one of the most expensive on the market and is, according to Mr. Higgins, the only coffee to drink with good brandy. Today, the annual out- put is about eighty tons and British buyers are competing for it against the Americans. Due to soil erosion, the harvest of this king of mild coffees will probably get even smaller unless capi- tal is spent to preserve the Jamaican plantations. (West Indian speculators please note.) But coffee need not be an expensive luxury and for the round-the-clock coffee drinkers the `ordinaires; the blended, rather than pure, African coffees have their place.

Mr. Higgins has little time for the people who discuss at length the best way to make coffee. 'There are half a dozen common-sense methods and none of them have any special mystery or magic, Yet there is probably more silly snobbery about making coffee than there is about wine.' He believes the filter-paper method is probably the most foolproof : the glass percolator way the best, because in drawing the coffee by suction into the lower bowl it preserves the aroma.

`Even when coffee boils,' says this most philis- tine of experts, 'it doesn't do much harm.'

What has happened to whitebait? a Worcester reader asks. She writes that she has asked for it at local fishmongers and has been told that there is no demand for it now. This, I am afraid, is true, according to a Billingsgate dealer. He tells me that after the serious South Coast floods of recent years these little inshore fish almost dis- appeared, local fishermen turned to other jobs and the public soon forgot the taste of this rare English delicacy. An unhappy case of un- familiarity breeding contempt.

Although I have not seen fresh whitebait on a fishmonger's slab for along time, they do appear on the menus of the better restaurants. These, I discover, are frozen, for it is to the deep-freeze firms that the small 'remaining catches go today. They are worth trying and make a change from that convention of , the expense-account lunch, scampi miuniere.

My correspondent also asks if they still have whitebait suppers at Greenwich. I have made in- quiries and cannot find anyone who remembers such a thing. Perhaps readers can help.

There is a move towards more original and unconventional colour and decoration ideas in the home, but, for most of us, choosing a new colour scheme is a treacherous step into the un- known. From personal experience, I know that living with one's mistakes until the bank balance recovers can be a sojourn in a Sartre-like hell. I am glad to see that Hamptons in Kensington have appointed Miss Jean Graham, a young in- terior decorator, to run a free advisory service for customers. Having net her, .1 know that she is not a high-pressure saleswoman, but is specially interested in helping customers to co-ordinate new purchases" or colours with existing pieces. She will answer letters and, if necessary and prac- ticable, will visit your home. • I was amused to learn that in the furnishing trade today the public' is sharply segregated into contemporary and traditional; but, apparently, when we grow very rich we all become `trad' men.