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What’s it called, then? If you have to make up a name, then maybe you’re just being stubborn on this point. I like where your head is at, but what things are called are based on historical and social norms a lot of times. If someone likes putting cucumbers on their pizza, it’s still pizza (I side with Kramer on this, as there’s a Seinfeld episode about it).
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Come on. It’s still coffee. Milk has been added to coffee for at the very least 400 years and probably way longer than that.
Just because it’s not how you prefer your coffee, doesn’t make it any lesser of a drink. It’s just not your preference. It’s still coffee.
I’d even venture to say that coffee without milk or sweetener is the abnormal version. There’s no need for this gatekeeping.
White russian is a drink. A very tasty one, too. It’s not gatekeeping, it’s about naming things correctly.
Unless you’re doing science or law (and even then often), if people know what you mean when you refer to something, then you’ve used the “name” correctly. It is so common to add milk or sugar to coffee that there is minimal connotation of “black coffee” in the word “coffee” as people use it, at least in US English. For this reason, specifying “black coffee” is much more necessary than “straight vodka” in actual speech.
It’s very funny to want people to invent a whole new word that is the equivalent of white russian for putting milk in coffee. There’s no benefit to it. If you want to be pretentious about preferring to drink your coffee a certain way, you can do that anytime. Or maybe you can give it a special name. From now on drinking coffee black is called Asshole Coffee. Put it in the dictionary.
It’s a bit different with espresso drinks because those do have specific names that are in common usage and ostensibly those names refer to something like a recipe.[1] If you order a cortado and they hand you a large latte, it would be reasonable to be annoyed. If you order a cortado and they ask you how many ounces of milk you want in it, it would be reasonable to be confused. If you order a cortado and then go add a bunch of milk to it, it would be reasonable for them to be confused.
But nobody’s confused if you ask for a coffee and someone asks if you want milk in it (or room for milk), and nobody’s confused if you get coffee and add milk to it. Or if you don’t. Because we all have a shared usage of the word coffee which does not stipulate additives.
BTW where things can get weird is when there are significant regional differences in certain terms. There was a fun thread on reddit a while back about a US barista who took an order form a British customer who asked for a latte made with “cream” and was shocked when the barista used heavy cream to make it. (After the barista had asked what they thought were sufficient clarifying questions to confirm that the customer didn’t just want whole milk or something else more normal.) The ensuing discussion turned up hugely different expectations from different parts of the anglophone world as to what “cream” means or can possibly mean, including a surprising degree of variation within users from the UK.
Although there is so much variation from shop to shop that the definitional boundaries between espresso drinks can get very fuzzy. ↩︎
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I can’t watch right now but I’m genuinely interested because creamers fascinate me. It’s a super American concept I just don’t understand. Why not use milk instead of palm oil and corn syrup concoctions
They’re often creamier and sweeter than milk. I find them gross though.
Now I’m waiting for the Hames Joffman edit
