Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 January 1881 — French Drinks. [ARTICLE]

French Drinks.

In the cases the Parisians drink beer, which chemical analysis shows to be bad and made with anything rather than malt and hops. It is true that you can have English, Flemish and Viennese beer, but, as a rule, the drink of a country is only good in that country, unless it be wine, and many exquisite wines will not bear transportation. Absinthe is very much drunk, insomuch that the heurc de I' absinthe has won for itself a place among the twenty-four hours of a Parisian* day. But the absinthe that yon find in most cases is adulterated and oxidized ; the vermouth, too, is falsified, and the liquors are often “doctored.” Wine, as we have seen, is not drunk in public by respectable people. The French d'ink, par excellence, and the Parisian drink, par essence, is coffee; that slow poison which supported the old age of Voltaire, and which did not prevent Fontenelle from becoming a centenarian. In no country in Europe, exepet Turkey, is c -flee so well roasted, ground and brewed as in France, and in

the commonest cases you will get a cup of coffee which is nectar as compared with the muddy and acrid mixtures which are sold as coffee in London and Berlin. In the Parisian cases two measure s are in vogue—the dem i tasne, served in a cup, and the mazagran, served in a long glass and stirred up with a long spoon as slender and graceful as the body of Sarah Bernhardt. You will find in Some vocabularies for the use of the foreigner that the name mazagran is only applied to cold coffee. This is an error, like that of imagining that a glass holds more than a cup.