Café chaud de la Louisiane

My Aunt Rose made the best coffee in the world.

That's because she made it the way God intended coffee to be made -- in the kitchen of a double shotgun house, on an old stove with a whistling kettle and a little, well-used French-drip pot filled with Community coffee. If you want to better understand Louisiana, you need to know about Aunt Rose's coffee.


I'll tell you how to make real Louisiana coffee in a second -- and, mind you, I know about these things. Take Community coffee, for example. That's what just about everybody from my corner of South Louisiana grew up drinking . . . that strong and wonderful inky-black brew.

Hell, I've been drinking Community since I was . . . well, for as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, I started off with coffee milk on the weekends.

Anyway, that's what you start your pot of coffee with, some Community "Pacquet Rouge" (above), named for the red bag (or can) in which it's packaged.

THE BRAND has been around since 1919, when Henry Norman "Cap" Saurage started custom grinding dark-roast coffee for customers of his Full Weight Grocery in "Dixie," a north Baton Rouge neighborhood that was pretty much "out in the country" back then. Today, the brand covers the Gulf South like the dew. It's found in every grocery store, and there's a chain of coffeehouses and a booming mail-order business.

I guess you could call ol' Cap Saurage a coffee tycoon. We just called him Uncle Norman, being that he was my great uncle. My half of the family was the poor relations, alas.

But we knew how to enjoy our Community coffee. Which brings me back to Aunt Rose, the little pot on the old stove, a kitchen table and an old double shotgun house off Greenwell Springs Road with a yard full of pecan trees.

Oh, and get you an old French drip pot, too. The one pictured above was Mama and Daddy's, and it's probably 60 years old.


AND BOIL you some water, cher. To make hot coffee, you need you some boiling water. But you knew that.

When I was a kid, I remember half the damn family crowded into Aunt Rose's little kitchen, all talking at the same time -- and loudly -- as everybody waited for the water to boil and then for the coffee to make.

This, realize, was an ongoing and repetitive process. Those little pots only make about five cups of coffee at a time.

Aunt Rose would be boiling water and brewing coffee as the conversation swirled around, by and through her. That's the beauty of coffee the "slow food" way. It's a great excuse to gab while you're waiting.


AS THE TALK went around and around, Aunt Rose would get out the bag of Community and fill the pot up to the ridge there.

Mama would be gossiping with her and my other aunts while Daddy complained about the world with my uncles, and all the young folk kept track of the dual streams of consciousness whizzing past each other -- and sometimes crashing into each other -- somewhere above the kitchen table.

OVER ON THE old stove, the coffee pot looked something like this. Poo yi yi, dis gonna be good, yeah!

AT SOME POINT, everybody would just have to talk a little louder, because the kettle was starting to whistle.

And when the water was boiling, Aunt Rose would turn down her fire just to that point where the kettle would stay at a slow boil. Nowadays, I find it easier to pour my boiling water into something that's easier to pour from than a big ol' kettle.

While the womenfolk were verbally separating the sots of the family from the saints, it was time to get serious about creating a pot -- OK, several pots -- of South Louisiana magic.

See, you pour you water on the grounds a little at a time so you don't make a mess, yeah. You don't want to make no mess with dem water and coffee grounds all over you burner, no.


AND WHILE the menfolk debated the relative merits of, say, Richard E. Nixon, dat communiss Hubert Humphrey -- well, Uncle Jimmy would object to that characterization of Humphrey, being the family's yellow-dog Democrat -- and George Wallace, cher, you grounds gonna start to look like this when dey foam up (above).

I could eat it like this, yeah.

WITH THE running tally being Richard E. Nixon 1, George Wallace 3 and dat communiss Hubert Humphrey 1 (God bless Uncle Jimmy, good Catholic that he is), Aunt Rose would be keepin' on keepin' on with the coffee.

See above? You keep doing it just like this until you got you a pot of good Louisiana coffee. Don't get impatient, cher. All good things -- especially coffee -- come to those what wait. They always somethin' to talk about.

AFTER YOU BEEN doing this a few times, you got to lift up the grounds holder to see how much coffee you done made, yeah.

You don't check on it, cher, and you gonna have a black-coffee fountain spoutin' all over you nice clean stove.


BY NOW, Aunt Rose would have all the coffee cups and spoons on the table. The sugar bowl would be there, too, as well as the can of Carnation or Pet milk if you wanted you some cream with your Community.

Now, ain't that one of the prettiest things you done ever seen? Hahn?

NOW THAT'S some coffee perfection, yeah. Ain't no Starbucks gonna give you no coffee like that, no.

Then again, back in Aunt Rose's day, we didn't know what Starbucks was. (Intergalactic cash money???) We didn't need it.

WHEN YOU HAVE good Community coffee, made amid your little community with care and love, every kitchen table is Starbucks -- only better. That is, if you make time to stop and smell what's brewing at Aunt Rose's.

I bet you can taste it now. Bon appetit . . . dahlin'.

Consider me alarmed

The following column from Monday's Wall Street Journal is why, boys and girls, we're about to put in the biggest garden we ever have.

Journal columnist Brett Arends doesn't want us to panic, but given that some big-box food sellers are having to ration rice and such, the Hysteria Express already may have left the station:

I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

(snip)

And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

These are trends that have been in place for some time.

And if you are hoping they will pass, here's the bad news: They may actually accelerate.

Of Christmas gumbo and 'offering it up'

It's the wee hours of Christmas morning. The Christmas Eve chicken -and-andouille gumbo is in the fridge, the Christmas Eve guests are long gone and Midnight Mass is long over.

Christmas music plays on a Canadian station on our old Zenith, and I've just polished off a bottle of Cabernet. So I'm sitting at the computer, pretty much alone with my thoughts. And my memories.

THIS CHRISTMAS has been strange, to say the least. From the Omaha mall massacre to the passing of a young friend, it's been impossible to shake the specter of death looming over this season of joy. For so many here this holiday season, it has been a time of profound loss.

And in the dark and quiet of this Christmas morn, we take time to mourn, to recall those who live now only in our hearts and memories. . . .

Once again as in olden days
Happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Will be near to us once more

EVERY CHRISTMAS EVE I make a huge pot of gumbo and we throw open the doors to whomever wants to share in the largesse. It's my attempt to keep alive a tradition from my mother's side of the family in Louisiana, when my grandma -- and later my Aunt Sybil -- would cook up mass quantities of chicken gumbo and put out trays of sandwiches, relish, fruit cake and bourbon balls.

It seems like Aunt Sybil used to cram something like 100 relatives into her and Uncle Jimmy's tiny house in north Baton Rouge. I come from a family of loud, argumentative people -- it's a Gallic thing -- and opening the door to that caffeine, nicotine and highball-fueled yuletide maelstrom was more than a little like having front-row seats at a Who concert.

Without earplugs.

WHEN AUNT SYBIL and Uncle Jimmy moved out to the east side of town after my grandmother died, they gained some square footage. I'd like to think, though, that what the holiday gatherings lost in regards to that sardine je ne sais quoi, they made up for in "only in Louisiana" weirdness.

Like in 1983, when my brand-new Yankee bride learned first-hand that William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor weren't making that s*** up.

Everything started out normal enough, ah reckon -- taking into account, however, that this was south Louisiana. You know, 87 quintillion relatives (the identities of some of whom, I had only the fuzziest of notions about) all talking at the same time. Loudly.

Of course, Mama assumed my bride had received full knowledge of all these people along with the marriage license. My bride, for her part, may well have been wondering whether she could get an annulment and a refund on the marriage license.

And then Aunt Joyce -- second wife of Mama's baby brother, Delry, whose first wife was mentioned only after spitting on the ground (or so it seemed) -- had a "spell."

IF WE HADN'T FIGURED this out by the trancelike appearance, the eyes rolled back into her head, and full knowledge of her bad heart, we would have been tipped off by everybody running around the house yelling "Joyce is havin' a SPEYUL!"

There could have been a fire, resulting in great carnage -- or something like that -- if Cousin Clayton hadn't been there to grab Joyce's burning cigarette.

Ever hear the song "Merry Christmas From the Family"? (And you would have if you'd listened to the Christmas edition of the Revolution 21 podcast.) Robert Earl Keen ain't making that s*** up, either.

Anyway, 20 people crowding around her announcing that Joyce was havin' a spell brought my aunt around after a fashion . . . and the show went on. At least until Aunt Sybil died some years back.

The sane one in my family, Aunt Sybil was the ringmaster of family togetherness, probably because she believed in "Baby, you got to offer it up." Everybody else . . . well . . . didn't.

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS after Aunt Joyce had a spell and Mrs. Favog got a masters in Southern Gothic, almost all of my aunts and uncles are gone. And I make my Christmas Eve gumbo up here in the frozen Nawth for friends who like exotic fare and funny stories about Growing Up Louisiana.

Then we go to Midnight Mass, being that Mrs. Favog and I are Catholic now, in no small measure because of Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy, wild gumbo Christmases and "Baby, you got to offer it up."

After we were confirmed in 1990, the wife and I got a package from Aunt Sybil and Uncle Jimmy -- a Bible, his and her Rosary beads, and a crucifix. The biggest gift, though, was one they never knew they were giving.

Someday soon, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, well have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.