Have some nice croissants with butter and jam, and coffee (if you want to risk it!), and enjoy Umberto Eco’s words on the subject.
Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usually made from rotten barley, dead men’s bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels. Of course, if you stay at the Plaza Majestic, at the Maria Jolanda & Brabante, at the Des Alpes et Des Bains, you can actually order an espresso, but when it arrives in your room it is almost covered by a sheet of ice. To avoid this mishap you ask instead for the Continental Breakfast, and you lie back, prepared to savor the pleasure of having the day’s first meal in bed.
The Continental Breakfast consists of two rolls, one croissant, orange juice (in homeopathic measure), a curl of butter, a little pot of blueberry preserve, another of honey, and one of apricot jam, a jug of milk, now cold, a bill totaling a hundred thousand lire, and a devilish pot full of swill. The pots used by normal people—or the good old coffee-makers from which you point the fragrant beverage directly into the cup—allow the coffee to descend through a narrow nozzle or beak, whereas the upper part includes some safety device that keeps the lid closed. This Grand Hôtel and wagon-lit swill arrives in a pot with a very wide beak—like a deformed pelican’s—and with an extremely mobile lid, so devised that—drawn by an irrepressible horror vacui—it slides automatically downwards when the pot is tilted. These two devices allow the hellish pot to pour half the coffee immediately onto the rolls and jam and then, thanks to the sliding lid, to scatter the rest over the sheets. In sleeping cars the pots can be of cheaper manufacture, because the movement of the train itself assists in the scattering of the coffee; in hotels, on the other hand, the pot must be of china to make the sliding of the lid easier, but still devastating.
—Umberto Eco, “How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell,” from How to Travel with a Salmon
image: Italy, Facebook
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