Chicory, the Coffee Herb
No chicory (Cichorium intybus var. sativum) did not appear in North America during the privations of the Civil War. No it was not one of those desperate measures, such as roast peanut coffee, okra seed coffee, sorghum seed coffee, that served as a stimulating brew when blockades forestalled the beans from Brazil and Columbia. Chicory came to notice during another blockade, on another continent. Hollanders during the Napoleonic Wars took the roots of the old European pot herb, chicory, dried them, ground them, toasted them, and added water. They found the result agreeable, so agreeable that when Napoleon was a bad memory and peaceful trade with the coffee lands restored, the Dutch kept drinking chicory. Those that wanted the caffeine kick as well as the piquant chicory flavor mixed it with coffee. The practice spread to coffeehouses in North Europe and into France.
Chicory roots are long and white, something like parsnips. When the plant is young and green the roots are quite bitter. A member of the dandelion family, chicory long grew in Europe’s gardens and fields. The Romans used it as a salad green. Germans boiled it. Every nationality used it as a forage crop for livestock. Apothecaries, noting the medicinal efficacy of bitter plants, began making an extract of the roots in the early modern period. (Because of its high fiber and abundance of inulin, it remains a medically favored vegetable). Finally the Dutch created chicory coffee in the first decade of the 19th century.
America’s taste for chicory coffee was stimulated by two institutions: in New Orleans the St. Louis Exchange Hotel began serving it when Baptiste Moreau was chef; in New York Delmonico’s Restaurant in the 1850s made chicory coffee its standard preparation. Despite the fashion for serving chicory coffee in the 19th-century the large scale planting of the vegetable did not take place until the 1890s when Nebraska undertook its development as a crop. Until then the bulk of chicory was imported already roasted and ground.
Chicory caused great confusion to the pure food advocates. They only saw it as an adulterant to the pure drug that was coffee. All adulterants were evil, for they permitted exploitative food processors to charge full price for a product that was not fully coffee. Sometimes the purist were spot on, as when lard producers intermingled hydrogenated cotton seed oil (think Crisco) and charged full pork fat prices. But chicory added aroma, piquant flavor, and smothered the bitter edge of crude coffee.
In 1919, the U. S. government banned the importation of chicory seed. In 1919 the coffee roasters of New Orleans petitioned that the ban be lifted because domestic supplies could not satisfy the demand of southerners for chicory coffee. The petition signaled a significant change in American consumption aesthetics. For much of the 20th century the South would become the region that craved chicory coffee. The North became fixated on different locales of coffee beans, and in the latter half of the 20th century, with espresso.
Much of the world’s chicory root is now grow in India, but American cultivators supply much of the material used in New Orleans to make the Creole Coffee that remains in favor there.