"milk and coffee" news and stories

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.