Lucretia P. Hale’s Short Story, ‘The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee’

Hale’s comical short story turns a coffee mishap into a lesson on common sense.

"Koffieuurtje" ("Coffee Hour") by David Bles. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Public Domain

The salted caramel latte has been a craze in the coffee world for a while now. When making this drink, some baristas put a pinch of salt on top of the latte, giving the drink an elevated flavor.

However, in Lucretia P. Hale’s short story “The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee,” when Mrs. Peterkin puts salt in her coffee, the results are revolting. And, as the Peterkin family attempts to fix the salty coffee, they comically skip over common sense.

More Than a Pinch

While preparing her cup of coffee, Mrs. Peterkin discovers that she added salt to her coffee rather than sugar. Moreover, the amount of salt that she put into the cup proves to be more than a pinch, and now her cup is ruined. Seeing Mrs. Peterkin’s predicament, the whole family seeks a solution.

After some thinking, Agamemnon suggests that they ask the chemist for help. Everyone agrees to this, and they bring the chemist back to view the coffee.

The chemist stirs the coffee and adds some chlorate of potassium. But it doesn’t fix it. He then adds bichlorate of magnesia, but it fails too. He tries tartaric acid and hypersulphate of lime, then ammonia. Still, all fail.

He tries adding “some oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, boracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous nitric, and carbonic acids.” Mrs. Peterkin thinks these acids taste pleasant, but don’t taste like coffee.

The chemist adds calcium, aluminum, barium, strontium, bitumen, arsenic, belladonna, atropine, granulated hydrogen, potash, antimony, pure carbon, and starch. Unfortunately, despite all of these additions, none of them remove the salt from the coffee.

After the chemist leaves, Elizabeth suggests that they ask the herb-woman for help. The family all agree, so Elizabeth and some of her brothers head out to find the old woman and bring her back home to fix Mrs. Peterkin’s coffee.

The herb-woman begins by putting the coffee over the fire, then she adds herbs to it. She adds hop, flagroot, snakeroot, spruce gum, caraway, dill, rue, rosemary, sweet marjoram, sour marjoram, oppermint, sappermint, spearmint, peppermint, wild thyme, tame time, tansy, basil, catnip, valerian, sassafras, ginger, and pennyroyal.

Yet the more she adds, the more the family dislikes the coffee’s taste. So, unable to extract the salt from the coffee, the herb-woman declares that the coffee must be bewitched and leaves. Mrs. Peterkin now has a worse cup of coffee than she started out with and no solution to solve it.

Suddenly, Elizabeth Eliza says, “They say that the lady from Philadelphia, who is staying in town, is very wise. Suppose I go and ask her what is best to be done.” After all the difficulty with and additions to the salted coffee, the woman from Philadelphia seems to be the Peterkins’ only hope.

Through her comical story, Hale demonstrated that, though imagination is fun, common sense produces the best results. She does so in a comical manner by showing the human tendency to dream nonsense. Her story evokes laughter and, in the process, arouses the reader’s—and coffee-makers’—minds towards the path of common sense, which knows the best way out of salty situations.

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