Concentrated effort

My great-grandmother, Ray Q. Thornton, kept scrapbooks in the kitchen. Or at least that's where I think she kept them. I have only the dimmest memory of the years Meme lived with us, but I remember clearly that there was a bookshelf in the kitchen and that at least some of the real estate on it was taken up by old-fashioned photo albums without a single picture in them. Instead the pages were full of recipes cut out of newspapers and magazines. I'm sure there were several volumes like this, but I only know of one that survived. It's a battered, old-fashioned "loose leaf notebook and memory album," full of clips by a Birmingham Age-Herald food reporter whose name could pass for a casserole: Sue Scattergood. The recipes Meme deemed worth saving were mostly sweets and salads: baked Alaska, coconut bread pudding, blushing apple salad. She wrote out many of her own recipes by hand, but the ones she got from the newspaper were neatly trimmed, then glued down with some conviction — they're holding fast to the pages after more than 60 years.

I haven't been so diligent in keeping up with recipes that mean something to me. The closest I've come to keeping a kitchen scrapbook was stuffing the whole May 6, 2007, issue of the New York Times Style Magazine into Brad's Silver Spoon. It's tacky the way the magazine sticks up out of the book and the pages are badly battered except where the cookbook has protected them. But I've held onto it for an Oliver Schwaner-Albright essay called "Iced Storm," all about the decades-old New Orleans practice of making coffee concentrate. The piece concludes with a recipe adapted from the Blue Bottle Coffee Company.

New Orleans Cold Drip Coffee

Ingredients:

1 pound dark roast coffee and chicory, medium ground

10 cups cold water

Ice

Milk

Technique:

1. Put coffee in a nonreactive container, like a stainless-steel stockpot. Add 2 cups water, stirring gently to wet the grounds, then add remaining 8 cups water, agitating the grounds as little as possible. Cover and let steep at room temperature for 12 hours.

2. Strain coffee concentrate through a medium sieve, then again through a fine-mesh sieve.

3. To make iced coffee, fill a glass with ice, add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate and 3/4 to 1 cup milk, then stir. To make café au alit, warm 3/4 to 1 cup milk in a saucepan or microwave, then pour into a mug and add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate.

(Concentrate will keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.)

I like to keep the finished product in glass bottles — specifically Traders Point Creamery yogurt bottles because their narrow necks make it easy to pour and the colorful resealable caps look awesome. In New Orleans, they keep their concentrate in mayonnaise or mason jars, which is, I'm sure, how Meme would have done it.