The Rum Laboratory - Cafe Noir (Coffee and Chicory)

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                                              making your own

                         Cafe Noir (Coffee and Chicory) 

Ingredients:

  • 4 Tablespoons Drip-ground Coffee
  • 2 Tablespoons Chicory (usually available at health food stores)
  • 4 Cups Filtered Water
  • 1/4 Teaspoon Salt (optional)
  • Sugar to Taste (optional)
  • Rum
  • Scalded Milk (optional, for Café au Lait)

Directions:

  1. Add ingredients (except for sugar and rum) to your coffee maker’s basket and brew. 
  2. Serve with the sugar and rum on the side.

Did you know that...

  1. Though the root has been cultivated since ancient Egypt, chicory has been roasted, ground and mixed with coffee in France since the 19th century. (The term chicory is an anglicised French word, the original being chicoree.) The root traditionally was used on its own in tea or in medicinal remedies to treat jaundice, liver enlargement gout and rheumatism.
  2. Some manufacturers roasted chicory with two pounds of lard for every “hundredthweight,” or cwt, of chicory “to give the chicory a better face.” Parsnips were also added occasionally, even burnt sugar was sold to coffee dealers and coffee-house keepers under the name of “black jack,” according to an 1874 article published in the Chemical News and Journal of Industrial Science.
  3. Chicory coffee was cheap and for this reason, it’s been used in times of coffee shortage or economic crisis, like the Civil War and the Great Depression. It’s also been used to stretch supplies in prisons. But if you ask a New Orleans native, it’s all about the tradition. 

Source: Smithsonian Institute