The Danish bourgeois meal around which Karen Blixen grew up is organized around the midday smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches on rye bread, laid out on the cold table, the *det kolde bord*), followed by the evening middag: a hot dish — often a roast or game — followed by a sweet dessert like rødgrød, and always concluded with coffee. At Ngong, in Kenya, Blixen superimposed this Danish grammar onto the products of the African bush, receiving her guests with European refinement amid the wild setting.

For seventeen years, Karen Blixen cultivated her own coffee trees on the slopes of the Ngong Hills. Coffee — dark-roasted, served strong in the Danish style — is the sensory thread of her African life: it appears at the end of every meal, and closes her table like a bitter, deep aromatic signature.