- Café con Leche

Being a Cuban, although frustrating at times, has some wonderful benefits. One of those benefits is café con leche. While I was growing up, I did not know of one Cuban household where café con leche was not served in the morning. From the moment a Cuban child graduates from formula, café con leche is poured into the baby bottle and given to them every morning.  

Café con leche is a pretty simple concoction; you take heated milk, add some Cuban coffee, lots of sugar, and a dash of salt. Do not ask me what the salt is for, I have never been able to figure that one out. But you cannot have authentic café con leche without a dash of salt. Some people prefer to add it to the already mixed coffee and milk, and others, like my mother, would add it to the milk she poured into the pot to heat the milk on the stove for the entire family. That is another thing, too; it is not real café con leche if you heat in a microwave. Maybe it is all in my head, but milk heated in a microwave just does not taste the same. You can heat the milk with one of those steam vents like the restaurants use if you have one of those fancy espresso machines, which falls within the café con leche rules and regulations, but for that home taste, you have to use a thin tin pot on a stove.  

A true Cuban household has to have at least one thin tin pot in the cupboard for the making of the morning café con leche. In addition, it has to be the replacement of at least two or three pots that melted into the burner when someone left the heating milk unattended. As a kid, I found the charred black melted metal disk with a pot handle sticking out hilarious. My mother, however, never found it that funny. 

Sometimes, when lady luck would glance my way, we would run out of sugar and my mother would be forced to use leche condensada (sweetened condensed milk) to sweeten the drink. Now that, my friends, is a real treat. If you have never had café con leche sweetened with leche condensada, you have not lived! 

As simple and easy as the recipe is, one question, however, has haunted me for as long as I can remember: Why is it that café con leche never tasted the same at someone else’s house? 

No matter where I could be—a friend’s house for a sleepover, a relative’s home, the neighbor’s house—their café con leche always tasted completely different. I am not saying it tasted bad, but it just did not taste like my mother’s café con leche. 

Perhaps it was the salt. Or, perhaps it was the spirit of the many tin pots whose lives were ended prematurely by my mother’s inattention adding character to the morning drink. To this day, I have yet to find the answer. And to make the riddle all the more maddening, I have never been able to match my mother’s café con leche in my own home.