Rimbaud never had a fixed table. His cuisine reads like an itinerary: in Charleville, the Ardennes peasant meal revolves around the foundational soup that opens the meal, bread that accompanies everything, rare meat, and orchard fruit to finish; in Paris, it's the meager snack eaten standing; finally in Harar, teff flatbread and coffee replace bread. We serve not an appetizer-main-dessert, but the stages of an escape: what you eat at home, what you snatch on the road, what you find at the end of the world.

Having become a merchant in Ethiopia, Rimbaud sent Harar coffee by caravan to Aden. This bitter, fragrant bean, roasted and drunk very hot, is the gustatory signature of his second life — the one where he traded the pen for the merchant's scale.