How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell by Umberto Eco from How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays There are several ways to prepare good coffee. There is the caffi alla napoletana, the caffi espresso, caffi turque, cafesinho do Brasil, French cafi-filtre, American coffee. Each coffee, in its own way, is excellent. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contains more caffeine than four espressos. Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usually made from rotten barley, dead men's bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels. Of course, if you stay at the Plaza Majestic, at the Maria Jolanda & Brabante, at the Des Alpes et Des Bains, you can actually order and espresso, but when it arrives in your room it is almost covered by a sheet of ice. To avoid this mishap you ask instead for the Continental Breakfast, and you lie back, prepared to savor the pleasure of having the day's first meal in bed. The Continental Breakfast consists of two rolls, one croissant, orange juice (in homeopathic measure), a curl of butter, a little pot of blueberry preserves, another of honey, and one of apricot jam, a jug of milk, now cold, a bill totally a hundred thousand lire, and a devilish pot full of swill. The pots used by normal people--or the good old coffee makers from which you pour the fragrant beverage directly into the cup--allows the coffee to descend through a narrow nozzle or beak, whereas the upper part includes some safety device that keeps the lid closed. The Grand Hotel and wagon-lit swill arrives in a pot with a very wide beak--like a deformed pelican's--and with an extremely mobile lid, so devised that--drawn by an irrepressible horror vacui--it slides automatically downwards when the pot is tilted. These two devices allow the hellish pot to pour half the coffee immediately onto the rolls and jam and then, thanks to the sliding lid, to scatter the rest over the sheets. In sleeping cars the pots can be of cheaper manufacture, because the movement of the train itself assists in the scattering of the coffee; in hotels, on the other hand, the pot must be of china to make the sliding of the lid easier, but still devastating. As to the origin and purpose of the coffeepot from hell, there are two schools of thought. The school of Freiburg asserts that this device allows the hotel to demonstrate with fresh sheets, that your bed has been duly re-made. The school of Bratislava insists that the motivation is moralistic (cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism): the hellish coffeepot prevents any lazing in bed because it is very uncomfortable to eat a brioche, already steeped in coffee, when you are wrapped in coffee-soaked sheets. The hellish coffeepot is not for sale to individuals, but is produced exclusively for the great hotel chains and for the wagon-lit company. Nor is it used in prisons, where the swill is served in mess tins, because sheets soaked in coffee would be harder to detect in the darkness if knotted together for purposes of escape. The Freiburg school suggests having the waiter set the breakfast tray on the table and not on the bed. The Bratislava school responds that this indisputably avoids the pouring of coffee on the sheets, but not its spilling over the edge of the tray and soiling the pajamas (the hotel does not provide a new pair daily); and in any case, pajamas or not, coffee taken at the table falls straight on the abdomen and the genitals, producing burns where they would not be advisable. To this objection the Freiburg school replies with a shrug; and, frankly, this answer is unsatisfactory. [Written in 1988, before the Macdonald's case.]