Mate Cocido with Curtis Daily
This Christmas season I had the pleasure of the company of my Portland friend Curtis Daily. He was in town to play his baroque string bass for the Chan concert on December 23 of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers.
One pleasure I share with Daily is our enthusiasm for drinking “mate cocido”. I prepare the Argentine tea by using a very large French press (dedicated only for mate). We drink mate cocido (as opposed to the classic one of using the gourd also called the mate). With my Argentine Navy custom of drinking the mate cocido with milk I heat up milk in the microwave. The resulting colour of the brew is something resembling swamp water (with no crocodiles).
The pleasure of the mate cocido was enhanced in how we sipped it. This we did from special cups and saucers.
Before we left Buenos Aires this last September, my friend Fernando Velazco gave me as a parting gift two cups and saucers. One is for the venerable Café Tortoni and the other for the London City a joint that was haunted by Julio Cortázar who wrote part of his first novel there.
Time with Daily implies conversation. There is lots of it. We compare notes on our mutual expertise (his music) and (me photography).
As his Christmas gift I printed the image you see here. It is nice but I have to add that the image seen on a monitor does not replicate the 3-D effect of the actual inkjet.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
