Coffee or Tea?

At first, coffee was more like tea than the drink we know today. The leaves were soaked in hot water, as were the dried fruits. By the time coffee traveled through the Arab world to the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul, it had been transformed into what is now a more familiar form: the fruit’s raw, dried seeds (no, they’re not beans) were roasted, crushed and steeped in hot water. The first coffeehouses opened in Istanbul in the 16th century; by the middle of the 17th century the fashion had spread to Venice, then London and Oxford before arriving in Paris. New England followed shortly after: in 1678, the city records of Boston note that John Sparry was granted the right to sell coffee. www.nytimes.com