, found that this curious use of the coffee bean had
been known for centuries. He brought back accounts and specimens of its
use as a food in the shape of balls made of grease mixed with roasted
coffee finely ground between stones.

Other writers have told how the Galla, a wandering tribe of Africa--and
like most wandering tribes, a warlike one--find it necessary to carry
concentrated food on their long marches. Before starting on their
marauding excursions, each warrior equips himself with a number of food
balls. These prototypes of the modern food tablet are about the size of
a billiard ball, and consist of pulverized coffee held in shape with
fat. One ball constitutes a day's ration; and although civilized man
might find it unpalatable, from the purely physiological standpoint it
is not only a concentrated and efficient food, but it also has the
additional advantage of containing a valuable stimulant in the caffein
content which spurs the warrior on to maximum effort. And so the savage
in the African jungle has apparently solved two problems; the
utilization of coffee's protein, and the production of a concentrated
food.

Further research shows that perhaps as early as 800 A.D. this practise
started by crushing the whole ripe berries, beans and hulls, in mortars,
mixing them with fats, and rounding them into food balls. Later, the
dried berries were so used. The inhabitants of Groix, also, thrive on a
diet that includes roasted coffee beans.

About 900, a kind of aromatic wine was made in Africa from the fermented
juice of the hulls and pulp of the ripe berries[374].

Payen says that the first coffee drinkers did not think of roasting but,
impressed by the aroma of the dried beans, they put them in cold water
and drank the liquor saturated with their aromatic principles. Crushing
the raw beans and hulls, and steeping them in water, was a later
improvement.

It appears that boiled coffee (the name is anathema today) was invented
about the year 1000 A.D. Even then, the beans were not roasted. We read
of their use in medicine in the form of a decoction. The dried fruit,
beans and hulls, were boiled in stone or clay cauldrons. The custom of
using the sun-dried hulls, without roasting, still exists in Africa,
Arabia, and parts of southern Asia. The natives of Sumatra neglect the
fruit of the coffee tree and use the leaves to make a tea-like infusion.
Jardin relates that in Guiana an agreeable tea is made by drying th