Drinking coffee from a saucer
by Bryce Martin

My grandmother drank coffee from a saucer. She experimented with different brands but usually brought home Folger's' mountain grown. She bought the two-pound tin for economy. It was a red can that opened with a metal key wind. My grandfather liked his cut plugs of Tinsley chewing tobacco so he would claim the empties and convert them to spittoons. Grandma poured the steaming hot liquid from her percolator into a cup sitting on a saucer but she didn't drink it out of the cup. She would add a little Milnot or Pet evaporated milk and sugar, stir and then she would leave the cup off the plate and set it aside. Next, she would dip a spoonful of the still semi-raging hot brown liquid and blow on it. You could see a slow wave go from one edge of the spoon to the other. Her lips would get close enough to the spoon to gauge the intensity of the heat it emitted. After two or three blows, she emptied the spoon's coffee onto the saucer, picked up the saucer, carefully tilted it downward and drank the coffee. Other of my older relatives secretly wondered if it was a habit picked up from old world relatives. I wondered too so I asked her one day. She seemed surprised that I would ask. "It's hot," she said. "I like to cool it down. I don't want to scald my tongue." As she got older, she switched to Postum. She still, though, drank it from a saucer, except when it cooled to her liking in the spoon and she drank it from that.

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