On 6 Jul 2005 01:13:48 -0700, "Matthew Huntbach"
"Nope: "froffy coffee" was common in the 1950s' "milk bars". ... roars whilst heating and frothing the milk with superheated steam."
"Yes, I'm aware of that, though as a folk memory rather than as an actual recollection, since it's before my ... variety of styles as in current coffee bars, or was "froffy coffee" what you got when you asked for "coffee"?"
I remember the mid-1950s coffee bar craze quite well. The one that I used to drop into, opposite the Tech where I was taking A-Levels, was absolutely jam-packed of an evening, and you really had only two choices - espresso or espresso with froth. If you just asked for 'coffee' you'd get the latter, and drank the coffee through the froth. It was not a true cappuccino.
A decade or so earlier, on the very rare occasions that my mother met her older sister in the city to catch up with family gossip (naturally, we didn't have a phone in those days), we'd go to a teashop, which might have been a Lyons or a cafe in Jessops, a department store. There they served either instant coffee made with milk, or maybe it was a small amount of extremely strong ground, filtered coffee diluted with a large amount of milk. But the milk was simmering, and it immediately formed a skin on the surface of the coffee which put me off coffee made with milk for life! I don't remember seeing Gaggia machines until the coffee bar craze.
In those days, coffee was a 'special occasion' drink. My parents had been given an EPNS percolator for a wedding present, and it just sat on the sideboard getting polished regularly. I think my mother bought a bottle of Camp coffee once, my father spat out his first mouthful, and the bottle was retired to the back of a kitchen shelf. I grew up associating Camp, as an alternative to Nescafe, with those snack trailers that sprang up alongside main roads, or transport cafes, where motor coaches would sometimes stop.
Robin