From coffeehouse to parlour: the consumption of coffee, tea and sugar in north-western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

Between the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, tea and coffee, both taken with sugar and usually milk, came to be consumed by people of almost all social classes in Western Europe. Not only did these products emerge as mainstays of world trade, but their consumption became a central feature of some of the most significant social rituals of European culture.1 Among the prime reasons that their use expanded, that they replaced domestic European substances as the licit ‘soft drugs’ of choice in the Western world, were the roles they played and the social and cultural meanings they possessed within the framework of these rituals. Of course, the psychoactive properties of tea and coffee as stimulants helped to promote consumption. The ability of tea and coffee to reduce the physical sensation of hunger, and of sugar taken in tea and coffee to provide cheap calories to the poor, also encouraged their adoption in Europe.2 But the main reason for the triumphal progress of coffee and tea described in the preceding article lay in their relationship to developing social and cultural contexts in the West.