Turkish coffee: a memoir

Turkish coffee has been a touchstone of travel for me, even before I became the compulsive traveller I am now. If you’ve never had it, imagine a dark coffee flavour with the texture of a thick hot chocolate. It gets its density from the grind of the coffee, a fine powder the consistency of cocoa powder. The intense flavour is due to the fact that the coffee is not filtered; it’s brewed and drunk with the grounds directly in the water, gradually settling into a sludge at the bottom of your cup. If you drink the liquid and leave those wet grounds to dry in the bottom of your cup, you’ll get a cute little coffee mudpie.

I’ve never visited Turkey, and yet I like to imagine Turkish coffee found me—or at least it captured a piece of my imagination. I’ve read that Turkish people use those leftover coffee grounds to tell fortunes, much like some folks read tea leaves. In this BBC article, the visitor to Istanbul repeats a phrase before the fortune reader begins: “Neyse halim çiksin falim,” meaning "Whatever I am, let it be in my cup."