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10/14/2007 Archived Entry: "Smelling and Making My Own Coffee"

I’m home, back in Brooklyn, and very happy about it. After nearly three months in Italy, not only was I more than ready to smell my own coffee, as my friend Rozanne Gold likes to put it when we travel, but I was more than ready to make my own coffee. I love that morning ritual, and when you are staying with other people, or in hotels, you are deprived of it.

There were two weeks in August, however, when I did get to make my own coffee while I stayed in a small apartment that my friend and business partner, Baronessa Cecilia, had set up for herself in a small restored building on her water buffalo farm, Masseria Eliseo. Her agriturismo, Tenuta Seliano, the inn she runs on her other farm, was fully booked, so Bob and I stayed down the road. Eliseo is only three kilometers away from Seliano, and is, in fact, where our cooking school kitchen is, along with her huge heard of water buffalo.

The apartment is in a two story structure that Cecilia figures is from the 18th century. Now it is painted a cheery yellow with a terracotta horizontal strip around the whole building. Below the stripe, on the ground floor, is a storage area. Upstairs it is a fully functional living space with good plumbing, air-conditioning, and gas to operate the stove in a new Ikea kitchen that has both butcher block and marble counters. The apartment has a roomy-enough bedroom with an old steamer-trunk and mahogany chest to store clothes, a tiled bathroom with a commodious shower (sometimes Italian showers are too small for me), and a big L-shaped room wrapping around the bedroom. This open area accommodates the kitchen, a double-doored armoire, a dining area with a marble-topped round table, and a seating area with a sleigh-style day bed, a bentwood rocking chair, and an Empire-style desk and desk chair.

Cecilia has yet to stay there, but she has furnished it with these beautiful antiques, fringed linen window curtains in which she has had small lace pieces inserted by an old seamstress she uses, embellishments that she actually bought at a stoop sale here in Brooklyn, and pictures and accessories she loves. And I love.

The wooden-shuttered windows frame a corn field on one side, and on another side a view of her horses in their corral before a backdrop of Mont Soprano, a peak that stands apart from the Cilento mountains and the Monti Alburni range that enclose the Sele plain (hence the name of her other farm, Seliano), the sea-level flatlands famous for the ancient Greek temples of Paestum, artichokes, and, perhaps most important, the mozzarella di bufala that is made from the big, black, horned water buffalo raised right outside this apartment door. I should add that the Sele plain are also the “beaches of Salerno” where the Allies landed in 1943.

For those two weeks that I stayed in Cecilia’s little apartment, I used her old caffetiera pot to make my morning coffee. You all are familiar with this pot. At the very least you’ve seen it in the movies, brought over to tables with red-checkered tablecloths and straw-covered Chianti bottles. It’s the Neapolitan drip pot that Italian-American restaurants always used. You boil the water in one half of the pot, put the coffee in a metal drip insert, then either pour the water into the insert or put the two pieces of the pot together and flip it over. I learned quickly that flipping it over is a little dangerous.

This pot makes excellent coffee. I thought it was even better than the pressure-type stove-top espresso pot I have been using for many years. I know that really good quality coffee is always best made in what is called a French press, or a drip pot with a metal filter, as opposed to paper. The caffetiera is the original metal-filter drip pot. With those two methods you retain all the nuances of fine coffee.

Naturally, I had to buy myself a caffetiera immediately. To that end, we went to the weekly, open market in Battipaglia, about 20 minutes away. I could only find the cheesiest aluminum version, however. It was 18 euro, which Cecilia thought was too much – she is quite out of touch with the prices on certain things – which translates to $25-something with the sinking dollar at its current $1.40-ish per euro. Now that I am back in Brooklyn, I saw nearly the same pot for nearly the same price at Two for the Pot at 290 Clinton St. near Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn Heights.

Thoughtful, dear friend that she is, the next morning Cecilia presented me with two gorgeously old caffetieras, a six-cup and a two-cup that she found in her vast basement at home, which is filled with three generations of stuff, both precious things and what I will kindly call accumulation.

The six-cup pot is what is on my stove right now. I just made a pot of Ethiopian Yrgacheffe, roasted dark but not black. It should be dripped through right now. So, if you’ll excuse me … .