Dish: Mem­o­ries, Recipes and Deli­cious Bites — An Excerpt

This appeared in the Toronto Star in Feb­ru­ary, 2002.

A cup of joe.

Who would have thought I am related – albeit dis­tantly – to the “Joe” of that famous culi­nary phrase.

It all began, as is often the case, almost by accident.

It was last fall and I was in Las Vegas attend­ing a four-day gath­er­ing of food writ­ers from across North Amer­ica. One evening, at a cock­tail soiree atop one of The Strip’s glitzy casi­nos, I was chat­ting with a col­league, Suzanne Mar­tin­son, food edi­tor of the Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette, and her inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist hus­band Bob.

Dur­ing our con­ver­sa­tion, I asked if they were related to the Mar­tin­sons of Mar­tin­son Cof­fee: a pop­u­lar Amer­i­can brand of that trusty brew. The pair answered “No,” although they knew the cof­fee well, and I thought that was that.

My rea­son for ask­ing was a long-shot and sprung from some recent root­ing around I’ve been doing to unearth my fam­ily tree.

My Mar­tin­son con­nec­tion dates back to the sum­mer of 1940. That was when my mother, at age 17, arrived in Seat­tle with her par­ents and younger sis­ter, hav­ing fled the holo­caust that was soon to dec­i­mate their large Jew­ish fam­ily left in Riga, Latvia.

Their escape, which took one year, was via Swe­den, the Trans-Siberian Rail­way to Japan and across the Pacific Ocean to the United States.

Hav­ing omit­ted to get their pass­ports stamped in Van­cou­ver, the fam­ily was refused visas to enter the U.S. They were impris­oned and would have been returned to Europe had my wealthy oil tycoon grand­fa­ther Aaron Nisse not con­tacted an attor­ney called Paul Mar­tin­son — a rel­a­tive of my grandmother’s who lived and, at age 94, still resides in New York.

As my mother suc­cinctly recalls: “He sprung us from jail and saved our lives.”

The four­some sub­se­quently stayed for six months in a res­i­den­tial hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side before mov­ing to Montreal.

When urged to tell this story, my mother, who rarely dis­cusses the refugee past that still haunts her, once remarked that the Mar­tin­son fam­ily was in the cof­fee business.

Fast-forward to Las Vegas where news­pa­per scribe Bob Mar­tin­son has returned to his hotel room to surf the ‘Net in search of Mar­tin­son Cof­fee. The result of his sleuthing, and later mine, goes back to that cup of joe and is as follows.

There was, it turns out, a man called Joe Mar­tin­son who was the attor­ney Paul’s uncle. Joe, whose fam­ily emi­grated to the United States from Mitau, Latvia, in the late 1800s, began his career in cof­fee at age16.

A resource­ful lad, he had the idea of roast­ing sev­eral kinds of high-quality cof­fee beans sep­a­rately before blend­ing them – an intri­cate, labour-intensive modus operandi rarely used then or now — in his mother’s kitchen.

“Joe max­i­mized flavour by dis­cov­er­ing and using the ideal roast for each par­tic­u­lar type of bean,” explains John Mar­tin­son, Paul’s son and co-owner of the U.S. tea com­pany China Mist. “That was what set his cof­fee apart from oth­ers and made it so pop­u­lar,” says John, speak­ing to me by phone from his home in Phoenix, Arizona.

Joe, he con­tin­ues, then sold the freshly roasted whole beans from a push­cart to his neigh­bours on Manhatttan’s Lower East Side.

The for­mula was an imme­di­ate suc­cess, says John, and the cof­fee aroma ema­nat­ing from Joe’s cart as he made his pop­u­lar door-to-door deliv­er­ies gave birth, word has it, to the expres­sion “cup of joe.”

In 1908, Joe bought his first small fac­tory and began mar­ket­ing his pre­mium blend to hotels and restau­rants. Soon after, he pack­aged the ground cof­fee in cans and sold it to stores.

From then on, it was your prover­bial all-American suc­cess story.

“Joe was a pio­neer in mar­ket­ing,” says John enthu­si­as­ti­cally. “He bought a small fleet of Rolls Royces in the 1930s. He had the back seats removed, painted the Mar­tin­son logo on them and sent out sales­men and deliv­ery guys dressed as chauf­feurs to deliver the cof­fee to upscale hotels and restau­rants in Manhattan.”

Ahead of his time, the clever entre­pre­neur also used small air­planes to streak across the Big Apple sky­line trail­ing ban­ners and served free cof­fee on Wall Street in the thick of win­ter from a Mar­tin­son bus. By the 1940s, the com­pany was in full swing.

Joe died in 1949, just before the com­ple­tion of his large new roast­ing and blend­ing ware­house at 190 Franklin St. in Green­wich Vil­lage. Since then, the com­pany has been sold sev­eral times.

Mean­while, the cof­fee has remained a super­mar­ket sta­ple in sev­eral Amer­i­can states. Cans of it were even used as major props in two movies: ET and The Incred­i­ble Shrink­ing Man.

Two years ago, Mar­tin­son Cof­fee wound up in Cana­dian hands when it was pur­chased from Tet­ley USA by Mother Park­ers, Canada’s old­est cof­fee com­pany and the largest family-owned pur­veyor of cof­fee and tea in North America.

Michael Hig­gins is its co-CEO. “Mar­tin­son Cof­fee is an old, old brand in the U.S.,” he explains. “Twenty-five per cent of its fol­low­ing is still in New York but it’s also big in Florida, Boston, Wash­ing­ton and Philadel­phia. It’s been in poor hands for 30 years but we’ve upgraded it.”

He adds another inter­est­ing twist to this per­co­lat­ing story.

In 1988, Drew Nieporent, owner of 16 notable New York restau­rants includ­ing the famous Nobu, bought the Mar­tin­son Cof­fee ware­house in Green­wich Vil­lage. Together with a star-studded group of investors that includes Robert di Niro, Sean Penn and Mikhail Barysh­nikov, Nieporent used the space to house the trendy, 150-seat Tribeca Grill.

It was here that Hig­gins decided to cel­e­brate Mother Park­ers’ recent acqui­si­tion of Mar­tin­son Cof­fee with a flashy party.

The story might end here but there’s one more twist.

In our most recent phone chat, John Mar­tin­son tells me he’s heard via the grapevine that Mar­tin­son Cof­fee may once again be for sale. “I should give them a call,” adding, “The cof­fee would need to be improved and mar­keted the way Joe did.”

By the way, to make a ter­rific cup of cof­fee, use my method: Using a paper fil­ter, pour 1 cup of boil­ing water over 1½ table­spoons of my favourite blend: half Brazil­ian San­tos and half espresso beans, ground fine.

Here’s a great cake to accom­pany your cup of joe.

Print­able PDF version

Sour Cream Cof­fee Cake

Based on the recipe by Toronto’s cook­ing and bak­ing maven in her book Lil­lian Kaplun’s Kitchen (Key Porter; $19.95). I like to bake this in a small bundt or tube pan – about 8 inches/20 cm in diam­e­ter – as it gives the pret­ti­est shape. You can use chopped wal­nuts instead of choco­late chips, if desired. Best served — with a cup of joe, of course – the day it’s baked.

• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 tsp bak­ing soda
• 2 cups cake and pas­try flour
• Pinch of salt
• 2 tsp bak­ing powder
• ½ cup butter
• 1 cup less 2 tbsp gran­u­lated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• Fill­ing:
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 2 tbsp unsweet­ened cocoa
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ cup semi-sweet chopped choco­late or choco­late chips, optional
• Icing sugar for dusting

1. Pre­heat oven to 350F.
2. In small bowl, com­bine sour cream and bak­ing soda.
3. In medium bowl, sift together flour, salt and bak­ing powder.
4. In large bowl, using elec­tric mixer, cream but­ter until soft. Add gran­u­lated sugar; beat until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, then vanilla. Fold in dry ingre­di­ents alter­nately with sour cream mixture.
5. In small bowl, com­bine fill­ing ingredients.
6. Grease and lightly dust with flour 8-inch/20 cm bundt pan, 9-inch/23 cm square bak­ing pan or 9-inch/23 round spring­form pan. Spread half of bat­ter in pan; sprin­kle fill­ing mix­ture on top. Spread with remain­ing batter.
7. Bake in oven about 40 min. or until tester comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack. Invert on to plate. Dust with icing sugar.

Makes 8 to 10 servings.

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