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I\u2019ve never seen my grandmother drink a single sip of coffee. No pourover, fancy French press, or flavored brew will tempt her away from her cabinet of caffeine-free teas and herbal tisanes. Known for pulling tea bags out of her pocketbook at restaurants, she once even brought bags of her favorite tea across the Atlantic when I took her on a research trip to the tea-steeped English countryside. Meanwhile, my grandfather drinks his coffee black, all day long, and by the bucket. His coffee set-up\u2014a small drip machine\u2014is relegated to one slim corner counter with a canister or two of Folgers tucked in a small cabinet below. Between his minimal coffee gear and the prominent kettle, cozies, and tea strainers, my grandmother\u2019s kitchen is clearly meant for making tea, which is why I\u2019ve always found it strange that she kept an old wood-and-cast-iron, hand-cranked coffee bean grinder on display in the pass-through window.<\/p>\n
The grinder has sat there for longer than I’ve been alive. Most of those years, I didn\u2019t realize what it was, just another wood-and-metal antique blending in with the other rustic touches in my grandmother\u2019s rooster-themed kitchen in North Texas. Now, as a food scholar with a specialty in food-related material culture\u2014the study of the power and meaning of everyday objects\u2014I see the same utensils and kitchen tools we touch and use multiple times a day with slightly different eyes.<\/p>\n
We all have these objects in our homes and in our kitchens. Sometimes they serve a different purpose than originally intended\u2014like a passed down pickle crock that now holds wooden spoons and spatulas\u2014and other times we simply keep them around to remember the people and places to which they once belonged. Growing up, I thought the grinder was some kind of treasure box since my grandmother used the little drawer meant to collect coffee grinds as a catch-all for found objects: a little ceramic blue bird, safety pins, bells, marbles, a winding key for an old clock, and the tiniest crocheted doily. Ultimately, the coffee grinder was<\/em> a treasure box, but of the historical sort.<\/p>\n Originally produced by the Arcade Manufacturing Company sometime in the late 1880s or 1890s, the coffee grinder first belonged to my great-great-grandmother Donna who was born in Bennington, Okla. in 1880. Just a few years later and two states away in Freeport, Ill., the Arcade Manufacturing Company was quickly becoming the major producer of coffee grinders for the entire country. The company made wall-mounted coffee mills as well as dozens of models of smaller box-style mills, including the grinder in my grandma\u2019s kitchen, with names such as \u201cFavorite\u201d and \u201cImperial.\u201d These box mills were fitted with metal hoppers on top of grooved metal grinders that, when activated with the hand crank, rotated against each other dispensing ground beans into a little wooden drawer below. Mills were not only practical for home coffee consumers, but decorative, too, featuring gold-stamped labels, polished wood, and cast-iron designs. By 1889, according to an issue of the Freeport Daily Bulletin<\/em> from March of that year, Arcade shipped sixty-thousand mills across the nation and expected to \u201cdouble their business within the next two or three years.\u201d<\/p>\n By the end of the 19th century, coffee consumption in the United States was ubiquitous and growing stronger as factory and office work picked up steam, coffee trade expanded, and the beans and specialized coffee brewing tools became more widely available. It helped that the caffeinated brew was addictive, too.<\/p>\n
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