The Cafetière
A heatproof jug, usually made of glass with a plunger attached to the lid, the cafetière offers a convenient way to make tasty coffee for several people at the same time. Its adherents claim that by slowly and steadily depressing the plunger, the grounds and their all-important oils are completely saturated, allowing the drinker to appreciate the coffee at its best.
While drip machines and percolators heat the water up quickly, it cools just as quickly so the optimal temperature is only reached around the midpoint of the brewing process. The cafetière, though, maintains the right temperature throughout the process. And in these environmentally conscious days there are no pods or filter papers to dispose of, the spent grounds can go into the garden. The only disadvantages are that the glass can break and because it is not insulated, the coffee does not keep warm for long.
Cafetière is the generic noun for a coffee pot in French, its use not restricted to a particular design. In English it is used exclusively to describe a glass jar with a plunger used for making coffee, a device known in North America as a French Press, in Australia as a Coffee Press or Plunger, and in Germany as a Kaffeepresse. Its origins are shrouded in some mystery.
Someone somewhere must have worked out that plunging coffee grounds through hot water made for a tasty beverage. According to one account, almost certainly apocryphal, an old man in Provence, who mistakenly had added coffee grounds to boiling water and to his consternation saw them floating to the top, had the presence of mind to press them back down again using a stick and a piece of metal. Not only had he rescued his coffee, but it tasted wonderful. Et voilà, the cafetière was born.
The first registered patent for a device resembling a cafetière was granted to the French duo of Henri-Otto Mayer and Jacques-Victor Delforge in 1852. The accompanying drawing shows a solid metal jug, looking like a teapot, with a moveable metal filter. There was one inherent design problem. The plunger did not fit perfectly in the container, which meant that some of the grounds floated back up and ended in the cup, a flaw that took several decades to resolve.
The first popular and commercially successful cafetière did not appear until 1913. Designed by Louis Forest, the Cafeolette was a small pot with a piston with a basic metal filter with small holes in it. Instead of using hot water, warm milk was poured over the coffee grounds, left for a couple of minutes and then the plunger was pushed down to the bottom to produce a café au lait. It sold well in Parisian department stores such as Bon Marché and Printemps.
Meanwhile in Italy, Ugo Paolini had developed a device which used a plunger to extract juice from tomatoes. He saw an application for his device in coffee making but passed the baton over to the Italian duo, Attilio Calimani and Giulio Moneta. They developed and patented in 1931 an “apparatus for preparing infusions, particularly for preparing coffee” included “a slidable filtering member having a fit sufficiently tight…that causing…[it] to slide towards the bottom of the vessel the infusion will be rapidly filtered to get it ready for use” (US Patent 1,797,692).
Next time, we will see how its design was further refined to become the iconic piece of kitchenware.
