The coffee menu

Spot the difference. Read on for the answer ...

The word قهوة | ʔahwa has another use alongside meaning a coffeehouse, and that is the strong, grainy coffee that in English we call Turkish coffee. It is prepared by boiling بن مطحون | bunnə maṭḥūn | finely-ground coffee grains in a تنكة | tanaka or kanaka | small metal pot with a wooden handle, and decanted into a glass or cup at the table.

The coffee comes with three levels of sweetness, as I've experienced it:

سادة	sāda	sweet
مضبوط	maẓbūṭ	sweeter
زيادة	ziyāda	even sweeter

The national sweet-tooth has meant that سادة | sāda, which should be unsweetened, seems always to have a little bit of sugar chucked in out of sympathy, as you wouldn't drink plain coffee unless you were mourning. A useful rhyme I've learnt to counter this annoying phenomenon is:

السادة للسادة

issāda li-ssāda

Unsweetened coffee for gentlemen

which is used jokingly like the phrase "no sugar, I'm sweet enough" is used by English-speakers who don't like their tea tasting like cat piss. Despite the fuss, relatively little of a Turkish coffee is drinkable, because once it's settled it hides between a frothy, grainy surface and the thick, muddy dregs, either of which, if sipped, will result in something like GloZell's Cinnamon Challenge.

وش	wišš	frothy head of a coffee
تنوة	tanwa	sludgy dregs of a coffee
قرأ الفنجان	ʔara_lfingān	to read (the future in the dregs of) a cup

I noticed an old man in a coffeehouse chewing spoonfuls of dregs having finished a glass of tea, and asked an Egyptian friend why. I was met with a look of confusion, not at the man's actions but at my question, and only later did I learn that tea dregs are referred to with a different word to coffee dregs. This surprising linguistic richness has managed to both propel and stall my discovery of Egyptian culture.

تفل	tifl	dregs of tea
شاى فتلة	šāy fatla	(lit. string tea) tea made with a teabag
شاى كسرى	šāy kušari	tea made with tea-dust or tea-leaves
بالنعناع	... bi-lnaʕnāʕ	... with mint

The variety of tea made with tea-dust is thus named because the bits of tea resemble the mess of a bowl of كشرى | kušari, a carb overload of noodles, rice, macaroni, black lentils and chickpeas with a dollop of tangy tomato sauce and fried onions. (The dish probably has its origins in a similar Indian dish called "khichri", which British colonialists then spread to various parts of the world. It managed to evolve into kedgeree back in Britain, so I guess only the Egyptians can be blamed for its disastrous manifestation here.)

Life in the coffeehouses

Rarely does a day go by during which I fail to spend an hour or so at some point in one of Alexandria's many coffeehouses. Many of the older coffeehouses have remained unchanged since they opened in the first half of the twentieth century (for better or for worse) and now host a unique brand of faded, grubby nostalgia. Customers wind up by default, if not once a day then several times a day, and what emerges within the cracking wood-panelled walls are theatres of Egyptian social life.

قهوة / قهاوي	ʔahwa (pl. ʔahāwi)	coffeehouse (also coffee - see this post)
بتاع قهاوي	bitāʕ ʔahāwi	idler (lit. belonging to coffeehouses)

A favourite of mine and my friends' is New Crystal, where we're greeted by the old-timers, some of whose parents would have lived under colonial rule, with shouts of "the British are coming!".

Mohammed has been writing a novel for the past couple of years, and has just left his day job at a courier company in Cairo, and now calls this place his office. He keeps his eyes on the window seats that look out onto the Eastern Harbour in case they free up.

With him is Dr. Mahmoud, a free-spirited character with some eighteen languages under his belt, and somewhere in the rucksack of treasured possessions he always keeps by him is the newspaper article attesting his talent.

Sharing the spindly table is Mr. Yousef, a retired lawyer who leads prayers at the next café along and occassionally gibes Dr. Mahmoud for drinking wine and shunning religion, although another favourite pass-time of his is to test us on English synonyms. We humour him until the rules of the game become too obscure and we declare defeat, conceding to his delight that he is the true Englishman.

The man in the corner is rumoured to have stood for president in 2005 when, under international pressure, Mubarak hosted a multiple-candidate election for presidency rather than a simple yes-no referendum on whether his rule should continue, as had been the case for his second, third and forth terms. The result was, not surprisingly, rigged 88.6% in Mubarak's favour, and our audacious friend probably came and took political refuge here in New Crystal.