Merry Christmas! Donald got me a Turkish coffee grinder. I've been wanting one for years. This one is brass and made in India. You turn the crank and pulverize whole beans into a fine dust. Finally, we can have freshly ground Turkish/Serbian coffee at home, like I remember from Yugoslavia and from so many Serbian households in America.  Why not just use an electric coffee grinder?

It doesn't work. You can run that thing all day, and once the coffee is chopped (it's not truly ground in those little whirling-blade devices) down to a certain size, it won't get any smaller. (Although they do make cinnamon sticks into powder -- I don't why coffee behaves differently.)

After the coffee is ground, it's placed in a jezve (a long-handled pot, also known as an ibrik) with water and sugar. The pot is heated over a flame until the coffee foams up. The flared top of the jezve allows room for the foam. You quickly move the jezve away from the burner and let the foam subside. Then you replace it on the burner so the coffee foams up again. Remove it again. Then again, for a third foam.

The foam is now carefully spooned into waiting coffee cups, about the size of espresso cups. Then the coffee is poured into the cups. It's dealt out a little at a time, so that everyone winds up with more or less the same coffee consistency -- and no one has a cup filled with all of the silty grounds.

The resulting drink is rich and satiny in body, with a deep, full flavor. Turkska kava. I just read on the Internet somewhere that this is the oldest extant method of coffee preparation, dating at least to the sixteenth century.

Ulysses had other uses for the grinder.