A tradition from New Orleans’ landmark Café Du Monde, chicory coffee’s diverse history blends perfectly with beignets and king cake all year long.

Laissez les bon temps rouler! Fat Tuesday is here! And not only is it the one day a year when green, purple, and gold are considered an acceptable fashion statement, it’s also a time when millions of Americans prepare for Lent by partying until the sun comes up.

Bourbon Street in New Orleans is always ground zero to celebrate Mardi Gras and today will be no exception. Groups or “krewes” perform free parades all over New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to as many as 100,000 thousand revelers on Bourbon Street alone. Colorful masks and beads are the chosen accessories as anything goes and the partying masses gleefully welcome the soberest time of the year

You can bet that many of those partying will need an extra dose of caffeine to stay on their feet to attend the dozens of balls and parades set to take place today. When in New Orleans, there’s no better way to do just that than with a cup of coffee from the city’s landmark Café Du Monde.

Coffee with a French twist

Famous for their powdered sugar beignets, Café Du Monde serves chicory coffee. The café claims that French explorers brought coffee to North America by way of New Orleans in the late 1700’s. These explorers had cultivated the brew on the island of Martinique around 1720 and couldn’t live without it as they explored the Mississippi gulf region. Can you blame them?

The history of combining chicory, which is the root of the endive plant, with coffee grew out of difficult times. The French began using it during their civil war as a way to add body to coffee when coffee beans were scarce. The root is roasted and ground and then mixed with ground coffee. It’s said to soften regular coffee’s bitter edge and give it a slightly chocolate flavor. Nova Scotian Acadians brought chicory coffee and many other French customs with them to Louisiana and the tradition remains today.

Chicory coffee is traditionally served café au lait style at Café Du Monde, which is prepared by mixing half and half and hot milk. But since anything goes in New Orleans, you can also have it served black. I can remember my mom bringing a pound of the coffee back with her from a business trip to New Orleans when I was a child, but Café Du Monde will gladly ship it to you from their online store if you can’t make the trip.

Dessert fit for a king

You might want to enjoy some chicory coffee with another Mardi Gras tradition that can be celebrated anywhere: king cake. If you’ve never indulged in this New Orleans delicacy, I can honestly say you’re missing out. It’s basically a cinnamon bread coffeecake twisted into a wreath shape and decorated with a sugary icing in the green, purple, and gold colors of Mardi Gras. Each cake has a tiny plastic baby figurine baked inside. The person whose slice of cake contains the baby must host next year’s Mardi Gras party.

The cake traces its roots back to the Middle Ages when a devotion to all things having to do with Christmas prompted bakers to create a cake in celebration of the Three Wise Men or Three Kings. Instead of a baby, coins would be baked into the cake. The colors used to decorate the cake (the colors of Mardi Gras) each have a meaning. Gold for power, green for faith, and purple for justice.

Today, no Mardi Gras celebration would be complete without a king cake. One online retailer, Kingkingcakes.com out of Metairie, Louisiana, claims to have shipped 36,000 king cakes to customers all over the world since 1999. Each cake comes delivered to your door with Mardi Gras trinkets like beads and doubloons.

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