Drinks

CAMPER’S COFFEE

1 campfire, lit

1 2 qt. grapefruit juice can with top removed, sides charred black

1 pot gripper for handling the can

½ can water

½ cup coffee grounds

2 eggs, shells only

Anny insisted that the can be a grapefruit juice can, not pineapple juice, not grape juice, so start with that caveat. The campfire, the pot gripper, and the water, there’s some latitude there. The eggshells are important. Eggshells help keep the grounds in the bottom of the pot and also help to reduce the acid of coffee brewed over high heat. Crush the eggshells to small shards but not so fine that they float; you don’t want them in your coffee.

Anny learned her camping skills from her father who was an avid sportsman. He bought a farm about 50 miles away from Lake Forest so that he could camp on the weekends. My mother adored her father and therefore adored camping. We adored our mother but we didn’t adore camping so something got lost in the translation/generation.

Besides the coffee, there was one good thing about camping. When you were in the sleeping bag and it had warmed up enough to think about something else, there was the night sky to contemplate. There were more stars in the 1950’s and 60’s than there are now. That’s a fact. There are very few stars left in the night sky in the twenty-first century.

Lou didn’t love camping. But he loved thinking about the stars. He said that if you had a powerful telescope and could see the farthest star in the universe, you could point the telescope in the opposite direction and see the same star. That made camping fun.

 Tea

Anny and Lou converted the chicken coup into a magical playhouse. At Anny’s suggestion, we painted the walls to look like a refrigerator and working kitchen. Lou had built “just my size” furniture: a table and chairs for the kitchen and a child-sized canopy bed to go in the bedroom. It wasn’t until adulthood, when friends would tell me of their fond memories of trekking over cow pies to play in the playhouse, did I realize playhouses were not a staple of all childhoods. Child-sized canopy beds and tea parties on the brick patio of the playhouse were not standard, but a world which Anny and Lou created for us.

— Jesse Louise Byrum Croft

 Grannie’s Ice Tea

Here’s the big debate: Gran didn’t put alcohol in her ice tea. So say her great granddaughters who are now grandmothers themselves. But I know that my parents made her tea and told Gran that there was alcohol in it, and it made Gran tipsy and giggly. She loved it. So did they or didn’t they? In this recipe, they did.

2 cups tea

2 cups gingerale

2 cups orange juice

1 cup Grand Marnier

Serve over ice with a coy slice of orange perched on the rim of the glass.