Harvard University has lots of places for eating and drinking. Clover sells food and coffee at the Science Center. The Divinity School’s Swartz Hall has a café for breakfast and lunch. Harkness offers the same at the Law School, and there is grub at the Kennedy School. Lehman Hall has a good cafeteria, with an Asian food station and an extensive salad bar. There are other campus places to eat, although none have particularly good coffee, and most are closed on holidays and over the summer.
The coffee at Jenny’s Café at the Harvard Art Museum – which I persist in calling the Fogg, its name from 1895 to 2014 – is much better. Drinking coffee at a museum is a bit like getting it in a bookstore or, as a couple of weeks ago, in a vintage clothing store. You don’t expect much, but may be surprised.
The Fogg and I go back a long way, before renovations and the arrival of a café and gift shop. Those would not have been considered serious enough for the “fine arts” on display, which in those days did not include much after the Impressionists.
The courtyard has always been impressive, but now, with the addition of exhibition floors and a high atrium ceiling, it is bright, too. The space and the marble arches used to be rather somber; as of 2015 it has a huge mobile “Triangle Constellation” by Mexican artist Carlos Amorales, a musical instrument with playable triangles.
The courtyard has hosted many events, including sherry parties for faculty. Something I particularly remember from about 1982, when I was director of a large project on cross-cultural learning at the School of Education and dressed for the part: The Harvard Gazette, a weekly bulletin of events on campus, listed a “spirit dance” by a Yoruba priest to be held in the Fogg courtyard at 5 p.m. on the day I read it. I left early to get to the Fogg on time.
The audience sat on folding chairs facing the entrance to the Fine Arts Library (now Jenny’s Café). An assortment of musicians dressed in vaguely ethnic clothing (some made of Indian bedspreads or what looked like them) were drumming and tapping on metallic bars, rather like xylophones. Cutting to the quick (and the dead), the priest, a large man in a loincloth and ankle bells, danced himself into a fever pitch as an acolyte sprinkled us with white powder, purifying us for the arrival of the god in the priest’s body. The priest danced into the library and returned with a live chicken. You know what’s coming.
With head wedged between the priest’s big and second toes, the chicken was quickly decapitated, then flapped her wings around the stage. The priest waved the bloody body over our now-whitened clothing to receive the chicken’s blood. Finally, the chicken stilled and the priest fell to the ground in a faint, signifying, it appeared, the arrival of the god.
We were told to wait until the god had left the priest’s body. Some of us needed to get home to cook dinner for families. At least one of us, an anthropologist who should have known better, was more concerned about her fancy work suit than she should have been and asked timidly, “and when might that be?”
The vague “maybe three or more hours” response led to guilty departures, hers (i.e., mine) included. How to remove blood from silk is a story for another time.
There was no such event on more recent visits, no need to call the MSPCA or Harvard police. Just a calm cup of coffee and the entertainment provided by meandering tourists. A visitor service person said that the most requested artwork was by van Gogh, but my favorite is the Kamakura period (ca. 1292) wooden statue “Prince Shōtoku at Age Two,” so serious and sweet that you want to pat him on his smooth round head or his smooth round belly.
That coffee you’ve been waiting to hear about: It’s Jim’s Organic, from Wareham. I was asked if I wanted light or dark roast, and of course I went for light. It was quite good, balanced and richly brewed, unlike the brew at most of the watering holes on campus. Let Jenny’s be a lesson to the them!
Jenny’s Café, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., near Harvard Square, Cambridge (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
