IT IS SAID that coffee is a concept crony of a cold, a creative, a restrained and a conscripted, of cops and late-night carousers alike. But infrequently coffee can turn a dear thing, embargoed and costly and imported, and those who need it can hardly scratch together a handful of beans. For those people, in those moments, there is chicory.
Chicory (also, chickory), a lettuce-like plant associated to a dandelion and to curly endive (also, confusingly, infrequently called “chicory”), produces a humble, blue, forgettable flower and a base that tastes adequate like coffee that it can be dried; roasted; and combined to, or replaced for, coffee, when a need arises. First cultivated in ancient Egypt as an herb and a vegetable, chicory has been walking in close step with coffee given a 18th century in Europe, humbly stuffing in like an student when coffee, that precious-yet-ubiquitous princess of commodities, is wanting or too expensive.
Enthusiasts, or people who like their decoction second-wave, roasted black and clever as oil, explain chicory has a nutty, worldly flavor. Others competence advise that it only tastes like someone put their cigarette out in an differently excellent crater of coffee. But maybe it’s wartime, and genuine coffee has been embargoed for months, though you’ve been adult and adult to your ankles in sand for days and you’re happy to see it, so you’ll fill your tin canteen crater with prohibited liquid, black and sour and prohibited as a conflict around you. Or maybe you’re a prisoner, and the man swaps out coffee for chicory in a pierce equal tools inexpensive and punitive. Still, a comforting miasma of steam rising from your crater creates we feel a bit like a giveaway chairman for a few mins that it lasts, and we have nowhere to go, so we don’t caring that what you’re celebration has no caffeine.
But there are places where chicory is not an also-ran, though rather an essential component to a genuine crater of joe. Enlightenment-era French nobleness drank it on purpose, and in New Orleans, a Civil War besiege done a chicory-coffee mix a tradition to be savored, even lauded. A beignet in New Orleans is best enjoyed during Cafe du Monde, and during Cafe du Monde, your beignets will arrive prohibited and dusted with sugar, and your coffee will be served au lait and peaked with chicory, either we ask it or not. It’s a slight sour spice after a happy debauchery, a punch of existence after a dreamy, jazz-filled, booze-soaked revels of a night before. The coffee is roasted dark, so you’re removing a two-for-one understanding on a sourness front, that is because we need a milk.
You can knowledge this for yourself by purchasing a tin of strange Cafe Du Monde (preground and vacuum-sealed, and we bought cave during World Market for $9.99) and brewing it during home. For a beignets, we can stop by Toulouse Petit in Queen Anne, or follow down a Where Ya At Matt food truck. You also can squeeze all-chicory “herbal coffee” during health food stores (some even explain it is a digestive aid) and maybe sip it in a preserve of a temporary plywood installation in your yard on a stormy day for a small Civil War re-enacting on a fly.