Hot or cold milk in coffee?

This Our Boarding House cartoon is from July 10, 1929. Almost 100 years ago, and we are probably still drinking our coffee the same way in the U.S. – with cold milk, if we add milk.

I live in Miami, so when we order coffee at a restaurant, if you order coffee, you get Cuban Coffee, which is espresso with about eight, yes eight, teaspoons of sugar.

If you want a regular cup of coffee, you order “American Coffee” and then you’ll get it. But in many cases, they give you warm/hot milk on the side if you ask for milk or cream with it. You have to ask for cold milk, like The Major here in the cartoon.

I guess it makes no sense to have hot coffee and then put cold milk in it, but that’s how it goes in the rest of the U.S. if you’re not in Miami. For some reason I skeeve hot milk put in hot coffee. As for iced coffee, I like it ice and coffee. That’s it. No milk, no sugar. I’ve ordered it at a McDonald’s and I have to explain to them more than once that I don’t want anything else in it, just the ice and coffee. They could not wrap their minds around the fact that I didn’t want anything in it.

I live on Cold Brew Iced Coffee when I’m in New York in the summer, usually from Starbucks, I order it on the app and pick it up. These days, as you know, it’s sweltering in summer so I drink that a lot. They know me at a few of the Starbucks in NYC and they just hand me the coffee when they see me without calling my name – I’m there that often. But they get it – ice and coffee. Nothing else. Well, one thing – they used to have these little square bites – they were lemon coconut, something like that. They no longer have that as an item on the menu. So it’s just the iced coffee, nothing else, right now.

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