de.hypotheses‘...as if roasting coffee beans until they are intensely burnt…’
A minor scribal note, left on a copy of a craft handbook ascribed to the Yemeni Rasulid ruler al-Muẓaffar Yūsuf, bears witness to a user’s engagement with craft knowledge.
While seemingly insignificant, comments such as these attest to the ongoing vibrancy of craft recipes, which continued to be used, modified, and transmitted long after first being written down, writes Leonie Böttiger 👇
Roast it Like Coffee Beans: A Copyist’s Practical Tips for Ink-Making
Scholars are still reconstructing the exact process by which coffee entered the everyday life of populations across the Islamicate world, but, as Cemal Kafadar writes, “the earliest users who regularized its consumption as a social beverage, to the best of our knowledge, were Sufis in Yemen at the turn of the fifteenth century.” Coffee barely… Continue reading Roast it Like Coffee Beans: A Copyist’s Practical Tips for Ink-Making