The cappuccino is one of the most famous styles of Italian coffee in the world. With an espresso at its base, it’s crafted from equal parts coffee, milk that’s been frothed using pressurized steam and a layer of milk foam called crema. Today, it’s often served with powdered cocoa, cinnamon or (controversially) coffee ‘art’.
In Italy, it has always been considered the ‘morning’ coffee, to be enjoyed first thing. It’s certainly still traditionally drunk before 11am, the milk content thought to be too filling for other times of the day and to cause sluggishness (in some Italian coffee bars, the metal pots used for steaming milk are even stowed away by late morning).
If you want a more specific definition, The Italian National Espresso Institute describes a cappuccino as: “25ml of espresso and 100ml of milk whipped with steam… the Certified Italian Cappuccino has a white colour, decorated with a brown border more or less often in the classic cappuccino… The cream has narrow links with very fine or absent holes.”
But while it may be neatly defined today, the cappuccino has gradually evolved over the last few hundred years, tweaked as differing recipes, changing fashions and improved technology have played their part. The only thing that seemingly hasn’t changed is the colour of the drink, a soft brown hue, that led to its name.
But let’s go back to the start of its journey, to the 17th century, when coffee first started appearing in Europe, a delicious secret they’d picked up from the Ottoman Turks. (The word coffee only entered the English language in 1582 via the Dutch koffie, itself borrowed from the Turkish kahve.).
The first European coffee house was opened in piazza San Marco in Venice in 1645, but the coffee was made in the Turkish style, finely ground beans boiled with water and sugar in a small copper pot then poured directly into a cup on the table, with the gritty coffee grounds settling at the bottom.
But European tastes began to change, and fashions in France and Austria started the trend for filtering coffee, which offered a smoother drinking experience. Evolving constantly, a new coffee called the ‘capuziner’ or ‘kapuziner’ popped up in Viennese coffee houses around the mid 1700s, drunk with cream and sugar. It was cream and not milk that was used, a more common ingredient in cafés and restaurants as it could be stored longer before widespread refrigeration.
One example is a recipe for kapuzinerkaffee jotted down by a German called Wilhelm Tissot and published in 1790, where the coffee is boiled then mixed with cream, sugar and spices and boiled again before being poured over egg whites and yolks and whisked.
Adding cream lightened the jet-black coffee, turning it a softer brown, the colour of robes worn by Capuchin friars, which ultimately led to the name that has been cemented in popular culture day.
The Capuchin order was a deeply religious off-shoot of the Franciscan friars, founded in Italy by Matteo da Bascio in the mid-16th century. They were renowned for their solitude, austerity and penitence, living simply, doing missionary work, walking barefoot, instantly identifiable in their long brown hooded habits.
It was a tough, hand-to-mouth existence. There are still several 18th century Italian phrases and expressions that give us a clue to the Capuchin’s rigid and rigorous existence: ‘To dine cappuccino’ meant to make a small, insubstantial meal and ‘to travel cappuccino’ meant to journey hard on foot.
But it was their robes, with its distinctive hood, which was the mark of a hermit in Central Italy at the time, that gave rise to their name. It’s said to have come from children who shouted “scappuccini” after them in the streets, which means hermits – and they were first officially named Cappuccini in 1535.
When the cappuccino coffee style was first introduced, the colour of the espresso mixed with the cream or milk was the exact shade of the Capuchin’s habit, a lighter soft brown. It was an evocative description, rather than the functional names more usual in coffee culture, but it stuck.
The only other modern name the Capuchins influenced was for the Capuchin monkey, with its dark coat that looks like a habit and white ruff on top that looks like a monk’s tonsured head (when devotees shaved off most of the hair on their scalp to show humility).
This mirrors a perfectly poured cappuccino, with its circle of white encircled by the darker coffee, still called a ‘monk's head’ in some parts of Italy.
But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the popularity of the cappuccino truly went stratospheric, its rise to fame closely aligned with the invention of the modern espresso machine.
According to patents of the time, a German inventor (he was also a theologian, philosopher and preacher) called Elard Römershausen was the first to build a machine, albeit a monster one, designed to extract flavour from coffee grounds using steam pressure, in 1818.
By 1822, Louis Bernard Rabaut, a French engineer who had emigrated to England, had developed something smaller and more manageable. In a patent truthfully entitled ‘Improved Apparatus for the preparation of Coffee or Tea’, he made what was essentially a coffee pot that forced steam downwards – an early version of the true espresso machine. But improvements were coming thick and fast - between 1806 and 1855, no less than 178 patents or improvement applications for coffeemakers were received in France alone.
While the many inventions continued apace, coffee fever in Italy was showing no signs of slowing down. But the problem was, a good cup was taking more than five minutes to create and serve – and the quality was inconsistent from coffee bar to bar.
So, in stepped a man called Angelo Moriondo. Born in Turin on 6th June 1851, he was an Italian inventor who’s been credited with creating the first known commercial espresso machine in 1884. His patent, approved on 16th May 1884, was entitled ‘New steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage, Method A. Moriondo’.
Angelo’s year got even better year when his espresso machine went on to win the bronze medal at the General Expo of Turin later that same year.
So now we’re getting to the more modern era of the espresso machine, when it was refined still further.
It was a Milanese mechanic called Luigi Bezzera who improved Moriondo’s concept (making it quicker, more practical and cost-effective) and applied for patent No. 153/94, 61707 for his innovations on 19th December 1901. His patent was later acquired by engineer Desiderio Pavoni, and the two of them became obsessed with creating the perfect espresso – even deciding that the ideal brewing temperature was 195 degrees and 9 BAR pressure. They introduced the world to their ‘Ideale’, their nickname for the machine, at the 1906 Milan Fair with the sign on their stand proudly proclaiming ‘cafée espresso’ – a name they had made up – and the rest is history!
So now the espresso had been perfected, what of the cappuccino?
The name seems to have been in general circulation in Europe by the 1890s and turn of the century. Certainly, popular enough to be included in an updated four-part edition of Karl Baedeker’s ‘Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second part: Central Italy & Rome’ in 1893. The author Karl was the second son of the founder Karl Baedeker, who was a pioneer in tourist travel guides in the 19th century. In this edition, it was written:
“Cafés are frequented for breakfast and luncheon, and are often crowded until a very late hour at night. In winter the tobacco-smoke is frequently objectionable. Caffe nero, or coffee without milk, is usually drunk (15-25c. per cup). Caffe latte is coffee mixed with milk before being served (30-50c.; cappuccino, or small cup, cheaper).”
By the 1920s and 30s, the term cappuccino was in regular use, in Italy and beyond, around the same time it was being served with a dusting of chocolate powder on top. In 1927, an Italian immigrant from Reggio Calabria called Domenico Parisi opened a coffee shop in New York’s Greenwich Village called Caffe Reggio, still going strong today. He scraped an astonishing $1,000 together (worth around $18,000 today) to buy a genuine Italian espresso machine, the like of which hadn’t been seen in the USA before. Built in 1902, it made perfect espressos, and it’s said that Domenico was the first to sell true Italian-style cappuccinos in the country.
A French writer popularised the word ‘cappuccino’ while in Venice in 1937 and two years later the Italian newspaper La Stampa published the name in Turin.
On 5th September 1938, Giovanni Achille Gaggia – who remains a household name today, printed on the side of millions of kitchen appliances – applied for patent number 365726. He had created the first modern steamless coffee machine, which forced water to flow over the coffee grounds at a high pressure, producing the ‘crema’ that is now unique to espresso.
The ‘Age of Crema’ had begun, defining the new best practice and setting the stage for the cappuccino’s worldwide supremacy.
For those not familiar with the term crema, it is the layer of creamy foam that effectively indicates the quality of the coffee – it can only be produced when using well-ground beans and a skilled barista to make it. The foam is created when hot water emulsifies the coffee bean oils and floats to the top of the espresso in tiny, smooth bubbles. With crema, the modern cappuccino had been born – good espresso, balance of steamed and frothed milk, crema foam, all in a small pre-heated porcelain cup.
Cappuccinos were now everywhere. In the UK, they became instantly popular in the 1950s, familiar and comforting for a nation used to drinking milk with hot beverages. It’s even been said that the cappuccino was the first form of espresso coffee that saw widespread consumption in the UK – before the adoption of the espresso on its own.
The cappuccino has slight variations all over the world, depending on local culture and palate preferences. It’s known as café crème in France, café con espuma in Spain, comes with a topping of cinnamon powder in parts of Europe and shavings of cardamom and clove in the Middle East.
From humble beginnings, it has become the world’s most popular coffee drink, topping lists in 24 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. And after more than two hundred years, the cappuccino is still evolving, still inspiring and still being enjoyed all over the globe.
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