A world full of coffee shops flooded with milk. Where there are only blonde, medium and dark roasts, the dairy selection boasts cow milk, soy milk, almond milk, cashew milk, oat milk, hemp milk, and coconut milk. Where coffee can be prepared as a pour over, espresso, in the pot, or cold brew, milk comes steamed and frothed, creamy or powdered, condensed in a can (if you’re Vietnamese) or curdled into cheese (if you’re Swedish), and even churned into butter. Our coffee is drowning in dairy.
Drowning indeed, so let the coffee get its revenge. In the great Italian tradition of la vendetta one unsuspecting café offering turns the tables: the affogato. An icon of the gleaming, steam-punk age of espresso behemoths, the name literally translated as ‘drowned.’ This time, the dairy drowns in the coffee.
Simply put, the affogato is a scoop of ice cream, gelado, or fior di latte (a simple cheese made from fresh milk), assaulted by a hot and bitter pour of espresso. Some serve it with a swirl of amaretto while others make it more youthful by subbing the coffee for hot chocolate. More traditionally, a swallow of strong grappa is mixed in as a version of an espresso correto with the addition of ice cream.
The affogato is best served with little ceremony–honoring its two ingredients without distracting from the point–-the contrast within the drink before you. A drinkable pun on the term bittersweet. A dichotomy between hot and cold. The states of matter clashing in liquid and solid. The yin and the yang of vanilla and coffee. A dietician’s qualm between drink and dessert. Your daily cup of coffee is transformed with a scoop of ice cream.
And after the meal, the waiter asks, “Any coffee or dessert?” Someone orders both and the waiter makes a delicious blunder. Espresso drools from some shining stainless steel tower that must have come from Italy during times of historical migration. A plop of ice cream dragged from a display cooler with a belly of curved glass and chrome detailing. In a mug, any old mug, the two duel it out.
The heat of the fresh espresso nearly sublimates the ice cream into an airy, white foam. The cool core of the scoop dissipates the coffee’s scald. Each bitter molecule donning a sweet jacket to insulate itself from the insulting cold. The creamy dairy runs out in miniscule deltas of muddy milk. Black and white, hot and cold, bitter and sweet vying for supremacy as you sip and spoon ambiguous states of matter into your hungry mouth. After a bit, homogeneity. A room temperature beige drink with something reminiscent of the fluff of ice cream and the bite of espresso.
Coffee taken with milk and sugar is not so different from coffee taken with ice cream. The difference is the drama present in the affogato which elevates it from the mundane cup of joe.
Reading through the libraries in Lancaster County, you come across a variety of entries on beverages. The Pennsylvania Dutch made homemade wines, self-medicated with whiskey, drank wild mint tea, and even spiced a sugary drink with some herbal bark called “spice hecka.”
As the pineapple supply dwindled, prices skyrocketed. The USDA reports that pineapple prices tripled in South Africa from 28 cents per kilogram to over 90 cents. If the government would not allow the South Africans to buy their booze, they would use some Mzansi ingenuity to make it at home. For this purpose, they required pineapples.
Both the ancient Greeks and Romans shared a hankering for chilled wine. In the absence of refrigeration, these civilized drinkers resorted to snow. Snow was collected during the winter, stored in pits, and eventually plopped into wine. Many different kinds of tools developed to help the ancients chill their wines such as the psykter and the colum nivarium. The Romans liked their wine hot too.
The religious exception to the Volstead Act allowed for Jewish and Catholic Americans to continue using wine in their ceremonies. This exemption was abused by thousands of Americans who took advantage of the fact that rabbis were not officially selected. Irishmen and others formed new Jewish congregations and became fake rabbis to get their hands on wine during Prohibition.
