December 19, 2012
Café au Lait
I generally began taking my coffee black when I became concerned about cholesterol. Of course, this meant that I no longer was brewing the dark roast coffee and chicory with scalded milk that I grew up drinking in New Orleans. Tonight, I decided to make myself a cup of café au lait. I put what seemed like an outrageous amount of coffee and chicory in my coffeemaker, scalded some milk, and used real sugar, rather than Equal. Ah, yummy. Too bad I didn’t have any beignets!
I don't know if this is true, but the story goes that chicory, a common weed, became a popular substitute (or dilutant) for coffee during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870-71. Creoles in New Orleans, always ready to copy Parisian trends, imported the custom. Even today many of us won't drink anything else.
ReplyDelete