The centerpiece is Bach's Coffee Cantata, number 211 of the secular cantatas, published in Leipzig in 1732 under the title Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, “be silent, do not chatter,” on a text by Picander. Schlendrian, whose name means roughly Slipper-dragger, tries to turn his daughter Lieschen away from coffee by forbidding her weddings, walks and gold ribbons; she yields on everything and on nothing.

Its aria has endured: “Ah, how sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses, sweeter than muscat wine.” The father wins only by threatening to deprive her of a husband, and the daughter then lets it be known that no suitor will be received unless he has it written into the contract that she may make coffee whenever she wants. Ukers sees in it a protest against the campaign then waged in Germany to forbid coffee to women on the grounds that it made them sterile.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXIII, p. 587-614; J.-S. Bach, BWV 211, Leipzig, 1732; on Pauli's thesis and Dufour's refutation, LC ch. 7

The song of 1711, titled simply Coffee, was set to music by M. H. Colet, professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. It did not circulate as sheet music but as a placard, that is, a large printed sheet meant to be posted, and it was on the walls of cafés that it was read.

Two mentions appear on it, and they are what count. First, the approval and signature of the police lieutenant de Voyer d'Argenson, without which nothing was posted. Then, the name and address of a merchant: a certain Vilain, rue des Lombards.

An authorized song, placarded where the drinkers sit, and bearing the seller's address. Ukers draws from it the observation that counts: the springs of advertising were known and used in Paris in 1711.

The theater followed. James Miller gave The Coffee House at Drury Lane in 1737, with as frontispiece an engraving of the interior of Dick's coffeehouse.

The play was condemned on opening night, and by the very people it put on stage. The Templars frequented Dick's, the landlady and her daughter were their darlings, and they recognized the room. A café satire was playing in front of its model.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXII, p. 541-586, citing James Miller, The Coffee House (1737), and John Timbs

In 1750, Carlo Goldoni wrote La Bottega del Caffè, a naturalistic comedy of bourgeois Venice. The setting is a Venetian café, probably the Florian, and the subject is gossip and gambling.

Its central character, Don Marzio, a chattering slanderer, is considered one of the best characters ever drawn for the stage. Pietro Longhi painted Goldoni himself as a visitor to a café, accosted by a beggar woman.

But it is in another of his plays that Goldoni left us the most precious document. In his Sposa persiana, he has the slave Curcuma deliver a real lesson in preparation, in verse.

It comes down to three rules. Arabian coffee is always the best. It must be ground fresh at the moment of use. And one heats until the froth rises, then removes from the fire, “and that at least seven times.”

The first two are still taught today. The third describes the Turkish method, in which the foam is raised and dropped several times in a row to concentrate the drink without really boiling it.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXII, p. 541-586, citing Chatfield-Taylor

That leaves the drinkers. Pope gave the most quoted couplet, “coffee, which makes the politician wise and lets him see through everything with his half-closed eyes,” and The Rape of the Lock was born of coffeehouse gossip. Voltaire is said to have drunk fifty cups a day in his old age. Balzac made it his food: according to Frederick Lawton, he went to bed at six in the evening, slept until midnight, then wrote for nearly twelve hours at a stretch while drinking coffee, and his Traité des excitants modernes describes ideas that set off like the battalions of the Grande Armée, the light cavalry of comparisons, the artillery of logic.

Ukers 1922, ch. XXXII, p. 541-586, citing Carruthers, Life of Pope, Frederick Lawton, Balzac, and the Traité des excitants modernes