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Cafe Au Lait
Make some strong clear coffee. Pour it into the cup with an equal quantity of boiling milk, and sweeten according to taste. This is the coffee which is served in France for breakfast, and it is both palatable and nutritious. Allow one breakfast-cupful for each person. Probable cost, 4d. per cup.
A one-line formula rather than a recipe, but the proportions and the temperature of the milk are the whole point.
- The hinge: boiling milkThe milk must be brought to the boil, or at least to a full steam, before it meets the coffee, as the recipe specifies; milk that is cold or barely warm will leave the drink tepid.
- "Strong clear coffee"In a book of this date this means coffee made in a pot and either left to settle or strained clear of grounds, not espresso. Since it is going to be cut half and half, make it stronger than you would drink it black.
- A breakfast-cupfulThe Victorian breakfast cup held about 8-10 fl oz, larger than a teacup and closer to a modern mug. Per person that works out to about 4-5 fl oz coffee and the same of milk.
- Equal quantitiesHalf and half is the traditional French ratio and it is more milk than most people now use. If it tastes thin, strengthen the coffee rather than shifting the proportion.
- SweeteningSugar is left to taste rather than assumed, and the drink is perfectly good without it. Added to the hot coffee before the milk it dissolves cleanly.
- SkimmingWhole milk boiled in an open pan will throw a skin. Whisk it briefly off the heat, or heat it in a covered jug, before pouring.
- CostThe 4d. per cup is a period note, not guidance. It reflects a time when coffee was an expensive imported grocery relative to a working wage.
Café au lait is simply "coffee with milk", and the entry is included less as a recipe than as a note on foreign practice: English breakfast tables of the late nineteenth century ran on tea, and coffee taken half with hot milk was understood as a distinctly French habit worth reporting. The large bowl or wide cup of milky morning coffee, often with bread dipped into it, is generally traced to the eighteenth-century spread of coffee-drinking in France, and it remained a marker of Continental breakfast in English cookery books for decades.