I first got a mocha pot when I lived in Paris. Finding a kettle in France is, we soon learnt, close to impossible. That is despite the fact that the French word for the thing - bouilloire - is so lovely to say that, if I were French, I would want to say it more often. (I would also want to drink tea, but that is an entirely separate matter.)
Kettleless albeit, we did have a load of electric hobs in our digs in the Maison du Cambodge (Cambodia House - chosen, presumably, because Cambodge sounds close enough to Cambridge, where we’d come from. I lived on the same corridor as Pol Pot did!) The mocha pot, that over-caffeinated cousin of the Dalek, was the solution to our caffeination needs.
Named after the Yemeni city of Mocha, it was invented by Italian engineer Alfonso Bialetti in 1933. Bialetti Industries apparently continues to produce the same model under the trade name "Moka Express". Of course, I learnt immediately that they are impractical, messy, impossible to clean, prone to overflow and prone to burn me and what little coffee they produce. BUT: they look good - positively continental - and as this substack may be demonstrating, I am someone who loves a ritual.
We had to get the tram down to Porte d’Orléans to go to the big carrefour to get coffee grounds, the majority of which would then be spilt in a cack-handed attempt to get them tightly packed into that little cup thing that clicks into the rather doubtful metallic water reservoir. Quarter of an hour goes by as the scalding vapour forms; then, rattling and spluttering, a bitter gold ambrosia foams out of that odd steel stamen within the head, gently at first, then with the heat and fury of a dragon’s sneeze. Of course you can’t touch it. Of course you can’t pour it neatly. And when you get some into a cup, black as bitumen, it is mere liquid ash. But it is a pleasant ritual all the same, and there is as much use in that - certainly as a student - than in the drink itself. And it’s nothing sugar and milk - or frankly a sachet of Nescafé - can’t fix.
I never use the thing now I am back in a land of tea drinking and have access to my Chambers’ sinister coffee machine. But for all that, I love mocha pots.