The smell of burnt grounds in the morning

Making coffee without the pot is not a good idea. But after it's all mopped up, what runs all over the countertop and drips into the drawers and onto the floor, there's a lingering burnt-grounds odor that's kind of nice.

The best kind of coffee is boiled coffee, northwoods style, made over a little campfire on a chilly morning beside an icewater lake. With a couple of eggshells dumped in. The coffee, not the lake. It's not the eggshells themselves, it's the little bit of egg white that's inside them that does the trick.

I worked at a summer camp one year, near a little town somewhere in northern Minnesota. I've forgotten the name of it. The cook, a Swedish woman - her name, I'm not sure I ever knew - made coffee by what she called "building a pot." She'd start out every Monday morning, making boiled coffee with eggshells in a big blue pot, and she'd keep it going all week, adding water, grounds, and another shell or two whenever the supply got low. Sunday night: Wash, rinse, repeat.

Oh, I've been drinking coffee a long time - cafe au lait in Paris, espresso in Firenze, kaffee mit schlag in Vienna, and the Starbucks too. But nothing tastes better than northwoods coffee in the morning, beside the lake.