classic
Aparila from Papua New Guinea by Canyon Coffee
There’s classic coffee and there’s non classic coffees. The latter are in a category all their own. Maybe they are classics because they aren’t as dependable as something that is always around and can be procured easier.
I can remember going down the grocery aisles and arriving to where American syrup stood, stacked in neat rows as cooked condiments did. As kids, we always reached for the original, it was classic. It could compliment thin crepes, be a viscous dip for buttermilk biscuits and drown fluffy-like-pillows pancakes with sweetness.
I would squeeze the syrup from its plastic bottle, and let it ooze like liquid from a funnel, over my stack of pancakes. This memory aroused thought, how does one upstage a classic? Perhaps, with something that accents, that foments difference, like a diacritic. I figured maybe it was when we had a little more grocery money or my mother felt like splurging on fancier syrup, I can recall her reaching for the glass Boysenberry syrup, safe from four sets of pre-adolescent hands that might drop it.
Petite, this maroon and viscous liquid, no sooner arrived at our Sunday table, before we emptied it in a singular setting. I didn’t think about the classic syrup then. Instead, I thought berries, many boysenberries sweetening buttery dough, coloring my tongue like dye.
Aparila is a stack of buttery pancakes with boysenberry syrup, a classic all its own.