Coffee Granita
Mom with her beloved granddaughters and her beloved coffee milkshake. She would have one every day when she was dying.
Mom at High Tea (but I’ll bet she had coffee!) at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, England. My sister and I gave my parents a weekend there for Mom’s 70th birthday. They liked it so much they took me & my daughter for tea when we were visiting the next summer.
Don’t give coffee to a kid! (I doubt they did. It was probably sugar. But, this photo made me laugh.). Me jumping on a pogo stick in my Nonnie’s kitchen. Kingsport, TN 1979.
My mom LOVED her coffee. Just freaking loved it. She loved it hot, black, and strong, and, yes, I know there is an Obama mug with that punchline on it! When I was little she would take me along on her errands. One of them was inevitably to Broad Street Coffee in the old Carr Mill Mall. I can still conjure up the heavy scent of the roasted beans. Even childhood Sarah knew that this was not average coffee. This was the good stuff. My friends’ parents did not make this weekly pilgrimage, instead settling for Folgers or Maxwell House or whatever you buy at the grocery. One of these same friends would go to Applebee’s with her family for dinner every week. This impressed me as exquisitely normal, and therefore, kind of exotic. When I asked Mom why we never went to Applebee’s she simply said, “Why would we want to do that?”. Case closed.
Back to coffee. Mom liked hers scalding and Dad liked his lukewarm. They were the perfect couple. They could share a cup and not get territorial over it. When the cup was no longer hot, Mom would gladly hand it over to Dad. I’ve had coffee all over the world with Mom, beginning in my teenage years with our ritual mother/daughter cappuccinos at the National Gallery Cafe in DC and ending later in life with our traditional after-lunch coffees in the William Morris Room at the Victoria & Albert Museum Cafe in London. Along the way, there were with lots of Costa Coffee stops, leisurely after-dinner lattes on the QM2, and whatever we could score from the highway on road trips.
There is one hitch in this story that will undermine the coffee street cred I just established. I guess that Mom and Dad liked their coffee SO STRONG that they didn’t mind it sitting and getting stronger with time. They would make a big pot and then drink it down, microwaving it throughout the day as needed. Sometimes they would even drink it the next morning. It wouldn’t get moldy or anything, it would just get, you know, intense! When I brought my husband home to “meet the parents” someone microwaved him up a cup of old coffee first thing in the morning. Of course he drank it. But, after a sidebar, we established some ground rules. Fresh coffee was non-negotiable. I spent a lot of time artfully dodging the topic with my parents and sneaking little cups of cowboy coffee (drip through a filter directly into the cup) to Chris until I had to finally say to my parents, very un-Southern-like, “We can’t take it anymore! We can’t drink this coffee!” and then make a new pot. My parents were gracious but just generally seemed perplexed, as they’d been doing this without being challenged for decades.
My parents’ affinity for caffeine also applied to Diet Coke. You could generally find a 2 liter on their counter and around a certain time of day one of them would ask, “Who needs a Diet Coke?!”. If Dad was doing the asking, I can *just* hear Mom’s response, “Yes! THIRST!”. She would proclaim that. “THIRST!” My sister and I used to joke that all you needed to make them happy was WiFi and a 2 liter. We were not wrong, exactly. My paternal grandparents had a similar relationship with Diet Coke’s precursor, TAB. They were insane for TAB. At one point they couldn’t buy it in their town of Kingsport, Tennessee so they drove across the state line to Bristol, Virginia and loaded up the trunk! Now, that’s some real Smokey and the Bandit action, Grandparent-style. I remember being offered a drink by my grandmother after a long afternoon of playing tennis. It was Christmas time and cold. The options were A. TAB or B. Hot Chocolate. Of course I wanted Hot Chocolate. What kid wouldn’t?! But, somehow, I knew to say TAB. My grandmother responded, “That is the right answer”. Artificial sweetener is apparently a part of my DNA. Go a generation further back and my Reed great-grandmother, known as “GG” to us, used to serve us TAB in crystal goblets accompanied by Pringles arranged in a wreath formation on a silver platter. Now, *that’s* class.
When Mom was dying, her appetite came and went, but there was never a day that she turned away a coffee milkshake from the Carolina Meadows Snack Bar. My dad would walk in with one and her eyes would light up, both from seeing her sweetheart and in anticipation of that sweet frozen treat. Today I’m sharing an easy recipe for the milkshake's cousin, the granita. This coffee one is tasty and a great dessert for dinner parties.
COFFEE GRANITA
This recipe is from chef and food writer, Simon Hopkinson. It's so simple, refreshing and very attractive served in stemmed glasses with lots of whipped cream.
1 pint (570 ml) strong espresso coffee (made in an espresso coffee maker) or extremely strong filter coffee (the dark Continental roast is best)
4 oz (110 g) granulated sugar
You will also need a shallow 1 1/2 pint (850 ml) plastic freezer container.
Begin by dissolving the sugar in the hot coffee. Allow it to cool, then pour it into the container and place it in the freezer. As soon as it has begun to form ice crystals around the edge, stir it with a fork to distribute the ice. (In a conventional freezer it can take 2-3 hours to reach this stage – so keep an eye on it.) After that keep returning and forking the ice crystals around until you have no liquid coffee left. This can take up to another 3 hours, but it is impossible to be exact as freezers vary.
You can serve the Coffee Granita at this point. If you need to leave it frozen, all you do is remove it to the main body of the fridge 20 minutes before serving. To break up the ice, use a strong fork: this is not meant to be like a sorbet, but is served as coffee-flavoured ice crystals. Topped with whipped cream, it is a lovely, refreshing way to end a good meal.
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