Il paraspruzzo

A former room-mate of mine had one of these gizmos and he was so obsessed with it that, after many mornings of his coffee, I had to have one too. A paraspruzzo (Italian, obviously) is a kind of perforated thimble which you impale on the pole inside those double-decker, decagonal metal coffee pots, so that the coffee, when it gurgles up through the pipe and spurts out the top, doesn't spray all over the kitchen. Because of this, you can leave the lid of your coffee pot open while the coffee is in progress and monitor exactly when it is done. Then you can turn the pot off at just the right moment and prevent the coffee from acquiring an unpleasant cooked taste. Isn't that marvelous? According to an Italian friend, the other "plus" of a paraspruzzo is that it gives coffee a bit of a frothy head, like beer, which leads me to the real reason I love paraspruzzi: any object designed for so a specific a purpose as this is a sign of true connoisseurship, and testimony to something rare and beautiful in humankind: the pursuit of perfection deemed worthy even for something as banal as a cup of coffee.

* You can get paraspruzzi in Italian kitchen shops. I just bought six to give as little presents and they cost 80 centimes each, which is nothing.

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