tates consumes more sugar per capita than
any country on earth.

Sugar adds high food value to the stimulative virtues of coffee.
The beverage itself stimulates the mental and physical powers,
while the sugar it contains is fuel for the body and furnishes it
with energy. Sugar is such a concentrated food that the amount used
by the average person in two cups of coffee is enough to furnish
the system with more energy than could be derived from 40 oysters
on the half-shell.

Since prohibition, the average citizen is drinking one hundred more cups
of coffee a year than he did in the old days; and a good part of the
increase is attributed to newly formed habits of drinking coffee between
meals, at soda fountains, in tea and coffee shops, at hotels, and even
in the homes. In other words, the increase is due to coffee drinking
that directly takes the place of malt and spirituous liquors. There have
come into being the hotel coffee room; the custom of afternoon coffee
drinking; and free coffee-service in many factories, stores, and
offices.

In colonial days, must or ale first gave way to tea, and then to coffee
as a breakfast beverage. The Boston "tea party" clinched the case for
coffee; but in the meantime, coffee was more or less of an after-dinner
function, or a between-meals drink, as in Europe. In Washington's time,
dinner was usually served at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at
informal dinner parties the company "sat till sunset--then coffee."

In the early part of the nineteenth century, coffee became firmly
intrenched as the one great American breakfast beverage; and its
security in this position would seem to be unassailable for all time.

Today, all classes in the United States begin and end the day with
coffee. In the home, it is prepared by boiling, infusion or steeping,
percolation, and filtration; in the hotels and restaurants, by infusion,
percolation, and filtration. The best practise favors true percolation
(French drip), or filtration.

Steeping coffee in American homes (an English heirloom) is usually
performed in a china or earthenware jug. The ground coffee has boiling
water poured upon it until the jug is half full. The infusion is stirred
briskly. Next, the jug is filled by pouring in the remainder of the
boiling water, the infusion is again stirred, then permitted to settle,
and finally is poured through a strainer or filter cloth before serving.

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