Coffee in time of COVID-19: How Dalgona became the comfort treat in isolation

A gloriously whipped coffee is internet's favourite isolation beverage

coffee vai Twitter

Richard Bradley, an early 18th century botanist, once espoused the consumption of coffee to keep off the plague. Bradley, the first titular professor of botany in the University of Cambridge, published a great many books and pamphlets on horticultural affairs. His writings could also qualify as popular science. One of them was 'The virtue and use of coffee, with regard to the plague, and other infectious distempers '(London, 1721).

The plague was roiling Marseille then, and threatening to ravage London. In the midst of this public health scare, Bradley published his treatise on the efficacious role of coffee in times of pestilence and how it prevented the spread of infection. He also gave express instructions on how to dry out the ripened berries before roasting. One had to pour boiling water over ground berries instead of boiling the coffee. His elaborate methods, he said, were worth the effort, as coffee cured everything from headaches, vertigo, lethargy, "coughs, moist and cold constitutions", to sleepiness, rheumatism, gout, fevers and infection. Most importantly, coffee was a happiness cocktail, an instant mood lifter. It lit the drinker's "vital flame" , he said, and protected them from "fear and despair". He warned that those “whose Spirits are the most overcome by Fear, are the most subject to receive Infections”.

What would the late English botanist think of the latest decoction that is Dalgona?

A gloriously whipped four-ingredient coffee—called Dalgona in South Korea—is the internet's favourite isolation beverage. What started to pick up as a trend in late January is now a kitchen competitive sport in all of Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter, with people vying to thrash out the most sumptuously whippety Dalgone coffee. And there is a reason why it resonates in our hard-pressed times where a generation of internet users is already attuned to ASMR-style hypnotica to calm frayed nerves. "It only calls for three to four very basic ingredients (instant coffee, sugar, hot water and milk) which are kitchen staples. Even in the midst of a lockdown, we still have them in our kitchens. When everybody is trying new things in the kitchen, this lesson comes at the right time," says Shivesh Bhatia, a popular 22-year-old Food Instagrammer from Delhi.

When Bhatia tried it on his YouTube channel, he saw many Indian internet users jump on to the Dalgona bandwagon. "A lot of people at home started making it instantly because the turnaround time is so less. Yeah, the part where you constantly whip the sugar and the coffee together, it's a lot like the Indian 'pheti hui coffee' that we have been making at home for a long time. The process is a lot like that. But where the difference comes is the presentation bit of it. While we pour hot milk in India over the coffee and drink it up, in Dalgona you take cold milk with ice in the glass and then top it with the whipped coffee mixture. The presentation is the reason why it is catching all the eyeballs," says Bhatia whose latest isolation treat is a five-ingredient tea cake made of parle-G biscuits, sugar, milk, baking powder and vanilla extract.

Instagratification, artfully arranged lattes, and the relentless, meditative churn of coffee and sugar until it is bulbous-buttery golden—why should that be a hardsell when we suddenly have so much time to keep staring at blank walls? Bradley would be pleased to learn how coffee has adapted and endured in times of crises, even though in his own time he was often dismissed as a bit of a rogue.

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