This is the cup for the mornings you want coffee’s warmth without coffee’s loan. Roasted chicory root gives it the dark, bitter body; rooibos rounds it; ashwagandha steadies it; ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom warm it the way a hearth warms a room. Turmeric and a little black pepper point the whole thing at the liver, which is where chicory does her work. Milk finishes it.
It is built as a dry blend in a pint jar, scooped and simmered a cup at a time, so the ritual stays — the pot, the pour, the first sip — and only the borrowing goes. New Orleans has been cutting coffee with chicory since the blockade; this cup takes the chicory and leaves the coffee behind.
1Ingredients
Cut and chip forms, not powders — powders turn to sludge in the pot. Weigh if you can; the spoon amounts drift because root is dense and rooibos is light.
2Method
A pint jar with a good lid, a small pot, and a strainer. That's the whole kitchen.
Weigh or measure everything into the pint jar. It comes to about 210 grams and leaves a finger of headspace at the top. Cap it and give it a long shake.
✦ The roots sink and the rooibos floats. Shake the jar before every scoop, not just the first one, or your cups will drift as the jar empties.
Put 1½ tablespoons of blend into a small pot with about 6 ounces of water. Bring it to a simmer and hold it there, uncovered, for 10 minutes. The roots and spices need the simmer; a steep won't pull them.
✦ A heaped 2 tablespoons makes a stronger cup and gets about 15 cups from the pint instead of 20.
Pour in about 4 ounces of milk — dairy, oat, or coconut all work — and bring the pot back to the barest simmer for 2 more minutes. This is where the ashwagandha, turmeric, and cinnamon meet the fat; they need it to give up what they carry.
Strain into a wide cup. Sweeten if you want to, with honey or a little maple, though the roasted root and the rooibos carry enough sweetness that many mornings you won't. Sit with it.
✦ Pour two. The second cup is for the ones who kept this practice through the lean seasons.
3What the Plants Bring
One line each. The rest is in the monographs.
4Notes & Cautions
Before you begin
- The dry blend keeps six months in a sealed jar out of the light. Brew each cup fresh.
- One cup in the morning is the dose. It is food, not a protocol; drink it for the season and see how your mornings change.
- Chicory is in the daisy family. If ragweed, chamomile, or marigold set you off, taste a small cup first.
- Ashwagandha is a nightshade, and sits out in pregnancy and with an overactive thyroid. If either applies, make the blend without it — it still works, a little less grounded.
- Chicory moves bile. If you have gallstones or a blocked bile duct, ask someone who knows your case before making this a daily cup.
- Use Ceylon cinnamon rather than cassia for anything you drink every day.
- Coming off coffee? Cut your coffee half-and-half with this blend first. There's a four-week way down in Borrowed Fire, elsewhere in this issue.
This cup asks for twelve minutes at the stove, which is about ten more than the machine. That is not a flaw in the recipe. The time is the point — a morning that starts at the pot, unhurried, on nothing but its own light.
— The Sage