By all accounts, conversation with guests at the Evergreens buzzed, and the two most important ingredients were Susan herself…and coffee. The well-read hostess held her own in discussions with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, while she made sure to steadily replenish her guests’ coffee cups from their arrival, all the way through the dessert course. According to Martha, Edward Dickinson, “…came regularly all his life each Sabbath morning [to The Evergreens] for a surreptitious cup of stronger coffee than home thought wise.” These are only a few of the several coffee pots in The Evergreens kitchen.
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 12–13.