It's been so very very record-breaking hot OMG-I'm-melting here that I've been reluctant to generate even the little bit of heat that brewing fresh hot coffee in my electric drip coffee maker emits. I could brew the coffee at night when it's cooler, and put it in a bottle to make lovely ice coffee in the morning—if you make the coffee a bit stronger than usual, that works quite well on an unbearably hot summer morning.
My mom grew up in the Depression era rural south, and her mom sometimes made Chicory coffee. Although we mostly associate Chicory coffee
with New Orleans, beignets, and Café Du Monde, it began as an economic substitute for coffee when it was too expensive, or too difficult to import because of blockades and war. The people of Louisiana brought Chicory with them from France by way of Acadia, and popularized it as a coffee substitute during the Civil war. Chicory coffee is made from the roasted root of the Chicory plant (Cichorium intybus); you've seen Chicory, and probably thought it was a wildflower; it has fairly long stems, with a multi-petaled lavender-blue flower that looks, roughly, like a daisy. Chicory was imported in the eighteenth century by European colonists, who used the perennial for cattle feeding and home remedies, and ate it themselves; Chicory is a cousin ofI will freely confess to spending my early adult
years as a coffee barbarian; I not only voluntarily drank instant coffee, I thought Sanka was pretty good. Eventually, I discovered the true elixir that brewed coffee can be from partaking of breakfast at diners. Once converted to the one true way, I inquired about how people made coffee before instant coffee, and Mr. Coffee, or even stove-top percolators.Some of what I heard seemed so odd, that I've spent a couple of weeks researching it. There are quite a lot of different ways to make coffee that don't require investing hundreds of dollars in fancy equipment. I'm going to be posting about several of the more interesting, and easy-to-use methods for making good coffee. Needless to say, these all assume that you're starting out with quality coffee.
