Coffee

How did I acquire a taste for coffee? It makes me stop and think. You know I am thinking when the steam comes out my ears. Steam is pouring from my ears enough to make the windows in my home fog up. I am thinking.
I remember my first taste of coffee. It was unique. It was black coffee. My thought was how can I make this tolerable? I knew there were at least four ways to drink coffee. As I say, my first taste was black. That was one option, albeit rejected.
Another coffee choice was with sugar. I was aware that with enough sugar, almost anything started to taste good. Tempting choice.
Still another choice was to use cream. You see, cream was like sugar. If you wanted something to taste really good, you poured the cream to it. My childhood is full of examples of making something especially good with copious amounts of cream. Take for example, peaches or cereal. "Peaches and cream, ah ah ah ah ah" comes to mind. So, I had to try cream.
If, sugar was great and cream was also great, how about both in the coffee?
I tried these different ways to make my coffee good. I really wanted to be a part of the big people world. If I used bot cream and sugar it was way, way too rich. I just did not like it that way. Interestingly, the sugar failed to make the coffee much better. But, a little bit of real cream into a cup of coffee was very good. It turned coffee from something to tolerate to something to cherish and savor.
The choice of coffee, or not, was now an easy choice. I was a coffee drinker.
The choice to include cream in the coffee was a little more complicated. At the time I started drinking coffee, there was no problem getting the coffee or whatever condiment to drink with it. Coffee, yes or no. Cream, yes or no. So it was , Yes please, yes please.
Well, as I grew older, the World changed. Some yahoo invented hydrogenation. They would take totally crappy oils and hydrogenate them until they had a hint of the taste of cream. Hence, coffee creamer. The advertisements even suggested it tasted as good as cream. I am here to say it was nowhere near to as good as cream. It was a substitute. It was an impostor. It was NOT cream.
So why make such a big deal about something with so little impact? It was not a little impact. It was a huge problem. They changed the rules in the middle of the game. You see, some people bought into the push to use fake cream. With each new convert, the demand for real cream went drastically down. So, at a restaurant, for example, the fresh cream did not get used as much.
Not getting used as much meant the cream in the little cream container was not as fresh as in the old days. If you went to your favorite restaurant as they opened for the morning, you could expect the cream would be fresh. But, what if you showed up at say 11:00? If you mindlessly poured from the cream container, you often discovered the cream had curdled. Or worse, it looked just fine, but with a sip, you noticed the cream had actually soured. Oh, my gosh. Soured cream in coffee is not good.
What to do? The quandary was huge. I began thinking about whether the cream would be good or not before I committed to the coffee and cream. Other times it was not worth the risk so I would tolerate coffee without cream to avoid a bad taste of soured cream I remember a day when I was about thirty that I decided the struggle to get fresh, rich cream was not worth it. Coffee was still important. So I made the rational choice to drink my coffee black. It was a great choice. I soon learned to really like the coffee this way.
That does not say that I lost my appreciation of excellent coffee with some fresh, rich cream. When I get such coffee, I will almost always cradle the cup in my hands and think to myself, Heaven!