Café de Olla Afro-Jarocho

This is Veracruz. Not the postcard port with the marimbas, the other Veracruz, the Sotavento, the low green country south of the river where the afro-jarocho communities have lived for four hundred years. Above them, in the highlands around Coatepec and Córdoba, the coffee grows. Below, in the kitchens of the Sotavento, it gets brewed in a clay olla the way it has been brewed since the days of the haciendas. Café de olla is a coffee of two geographies: the mountain that grows the bean and the coast that brews it.

You need four things and the right ceramic. Coffee, medium-dark, ground coarse like you would for a French press. Piloncillo, the cone of unrefined cane sugar, not white sugar and not the 'raw sugar' from a health food store. Canela de Ceilán, true Ceylon cinnamon, the soft flaky bark that crumbles between your fingers, not the hard red cassia stick most people think is cinnamon. And the peel of one orange, no white pith. The olla has to be clay. Barro. The clay is not decoration. It rounds the coffee, takes the edge off the acid, and gives it that earthy back-note a metal pot will never give you.

I learned this version in a kitchen outside Tlacotalpan, from a woman whose family had grown and picked coffee for three generations. She put the orange peel in. My mother, from Jalisco, made café de olla without it, just piloncillo and canela. The orange is the Sotavento. It cuts the sweetness and lifts the whole pot. The afromestiza cooks of this coast have been making coffee like this since their ancestors were brought through the port of Veracruz, and the country only got around to writing them into its Constitution a few years ago. The coffee did not wait for the paperwork.

One rule you cannot break: do not boil the coffee. You simmer the water with the piloncillo, the canela, and the orange until the sugar melts and the kitchen smells like a panadería. Then you barely simmer the grounds, pull it off the heat, and let it rest. Boil it hard and you cook out the aroma and drag bitterness from the grounds. Treat it gently and you get sweet, spiced, slow, earthy coffee in a clay cup. Así se hace y punto.