Ingredients

Enjoy a little moo juice in your coffee? Yeah, so does much of the rest of the world. But when did we all start making that delicious black liquid brown?

According to the (amazing, and available for free download) 1922 volume "All About Coffee" by William H. Ukers, it was a Dutch ambassador in 1660 who first had the bright idea to mix nature's liquid candy with the life-giving elixir we know as a cuppa joe. French doctors did one better 15 years later, when they started prescribing the following combination as medicinal: "Place on the fire a bowl of milk. When it begins to rise, throw in to it a bowl of powdered coffee, [and] a bowl of moist sugar, and let it boil for some time."

Okay, that actually sounds kind of gross. But milk's natural sweetness remains the obvious counterpart to coffee's inherent (and, hopefully, pleasant) bitterness. Read on after the jump for some other international historical takes on the light-two-sugars revolution.

There are some things in this world that were meant to taste like hazelnut. Actual hazelnuts, for instance, and also Aunt Sylvia's famous holiday pralines. Maybe even a hot cocoa or a cookie batter that has a dash of extract in it.

But what about coffee beans?

Flavored coffee is and will likely always be a loaded topic; It's often considered the final qualifier when separating the proverbial men from the boys of caffeinated beverages. "Is it really so bad?," you might ask yourself. "What's all the hubbub?"

Read on after the jump to find out.

Happy National English Toffee Day!

For a simple base of butter and sugar, it's incredible what a decadent dessert toffee forms, with its initial -- but not cloying -- sweetness followed by a pleasantly lingering buttery flavor. One could argue that the only thing this dulcet sweet has working against it is surely its pesky ability to cling to teeth...

But then again, we're amazed at how simple it is to make your own tray of the buttery delicacy. Aside from a few ingredients, the main apparatus needed is just a candy thermometer. If you're feeling ambitious on this National Toffee Day, try making some yourself -- and who better to learn from than Paula Deen, the reigning culinary queen of butter? (Heck, in addition to heaping it copiously into the vast majority of her recipes, she's even been known to drink it straight!)

So get cracking on her alluringly simple recipe -- it's divine, y'all.

They don't call them "G.I. Joe" for nothing: It's thanks to U.S. service people that we have one more delicious round in our catalog of caffeinated ammunition: caffè Americano.

During the Allied occupation of Italy in WWII, American soldiers would walk up to a counter and order a caffè, only to be somewhat alarmed by the dainty little espresso cups placed in front of them. You can almost hear the Yankee accents echoing off the walls of this or that bar in Rome: "You call this coffee? Where's the rest of it?!" It wasn't long before the Italian baristas realized that what the boys from the U.S. of A. really wanted was a larger, diluted beverage: By adding hot water to the usual espresso, they could more or less replicate the soldiers' traditional hot cup of "mud."

Today, caffè Americano lives on many stateside coffeeshop menus alongside the more conventional brewed coffee, largely as a matter of taste. Some imbibers see the hot, watered-down espresso as a very fresh alternative to the average filtered brew. Many prefer the flavor or the body of the more voluminous drink, while others bicker endlessly about which concoction has the most caffeine. (Answer: It kind of depends.)

Which do you prefer: caffè Americano or just a regular ol' cuppa joe? Tell us in the comments.

Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series for the caffeine-addicted.

It's easy to make healthy eats taste great when you cook with seasonal ingredients. Grapefruit is a wonderful example, and you're in luck because it's in season right now. Perhaps you have tart memories of squeezing yourself in the eye while experimenting dieting on plain grapefruit halves, but there are so many other creative ways to serve this tart fruit. It doesn't have to be restricted to breakfast; consider these recipes for turning this figure-friendly fruit into appetizers and party drinks.