From Rome with froth – and love

Nothing says ‘I’ve got this’ quite like a mini piece of steam-age machinery on the benchtop

Every morning in our house, an old boiler splutters to life and, after a bit of encouragement, delivers a flat white any barista would envy.

Our La Pavoni Professional coffee machine is over 25 years old now. The upright chrome boiler, pressure valve and lever are its distinctive features, but it has been knocked around a bit – the water-gauge casing is broken and the washers need replacing a bit more often.

The Professional has been in production since 1961 and is a fully manual, lever espresso machine. An electric element inside the boiler heats the water which is then forced under pressure through the coffee using a piston controlled by the lever. A steam wand is used to heat and froth milk.

With a bit of practice and patience, the home barista can make a great coffee with these machines and savour the cool factor. Because nothing says “I’ve got this” quite like a mini piece of steam-age machinery on the benchtop.

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Our La Pavoni is a sort-of souvenir, a memento of a Christmas break spent in France and Italy not long after we were married. Earlier that year, my wonderful mother-in-law Monica had given us a gift of money with a nudge in the direction of a clothes dryer.

We had another appliance in mind.

Winters are touted as mild in the Eternal City but on the day Laurie and I boarded a train for the suburbs in Rome, a bitterly cold wind was blowing in from Siberia.

We were armed with the address of a local coffee machine store. It was tiny and full of boxed-up coffee machines. The shopkeeper rummaged through and found what we were looking for. We secured our prize and travelled back to New Zealand the following day with our coffee machine as hand luggage.

The La Pavoni Professional and its ilk had their genesis in the steam engines of the industrial revolution.

Italian entrepreneur Desiderio Pavoni did not create the espresso machine but modified a machine patented in 1902 by Luigi Bezzera who, in turn, was building on the work of Italian inventor Angelo Moriondo. In 1884, Moriondo had made use of the burgeoning steam-engine technology to create and patent “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage”.

Coffee had become popular in Europe as early as the 1600s, when it was brewed in a small pot, in much the same way Turkish and Greek coffee is still made.

It was a time-consuming process for cafes looking to do a brisk trade and, by the late 1800s, the new steam-driven “espresso” machines sped up the brewing process significantly, so revolutionising the coffee houses.

These places had already gained a reputation for revolutionary spirit, bred by the mixing of all classes of men with a penchant for sitting around drinking coffee and talking sedition.

In the 1600s, King Charles II briefly toyed with closing coffee houses for this very reason.

There are now a multitude of espresso machines available with many bells and whistles and automation, but the manual La Pavoni Professional (and its smaller sibling Europiccola) remain design icons.

In 1973, the Europiccola appeared in the James Bond film Live and Let Die, a chic gadget in his otherwise conservative-looking apartment.

Needless to say, when our La Pavoni arrived back in New Zealand, where French presses were steadily replacing drip-filter machines as the “cool kids” in home coffee production, Monica was surprised to learn it was even possible to spend as much on a coffee machine as a clothes dryer.

I thank her every morning.