The Lost Tongue - CoffeeMilk
Artwork courtesy of Megan Broussard Maughan, designed by Blake Lagneaux.
I was standing in a supermarket in Newport, Rhode Island when I saw something in the refrigerator I’ve only ever seen in a Louisiana kitchen: coffee milk.
I’d lived in New York City for at least eight years at this point. Sure, I could order a café au lait, or café con leche as it’s often referred to, at any coffee shop from here to Jersey and Pennsylvania, but I’d never seen the term “coffee milk” used outside of Cajun/Creole Country, let alone being packaged and sold in New England. And, as regular readers of this column will know by now, I’m a curious little creature determined to find definitive answers (as best I can) about our culture’s eccentricities. So I was like a catahoula with a bone, off to decipher our coffee milk connection to The Ocean State.
There was just one small problem. I couldn't find an official history of coffee milk, anywhere. It wasn’t written about in any book I could get my hands on. There didn’t seem to be a food historian who’d chosen Cajun/Creole coffee milk as their grad school thesis. Nada (or, in French, rien). Coffee milk, it seemed, had somehow fallen through the cracks of Louisiana culinary history, perhaps too ordinary to document, too ubiquitous to examine. So, I tapped into the network of eccentric Louisaiana experts I’ve collected over the years—a group of historians, linguists, and folklorists passionate about Louisiana culture. I call them “The Roux Crew.”
And while one of those experts, Shane K. Bernard, historian and author of one of my favorite books The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, didn't necessarily have answers, he had something even better: an extraordinarily engaged social media following.
He posted my coffee milk questions to his Facebook and Instagram, and his friend Wade Falcon, a Cajun music historian and writer, shared the post in the Facebook group “Cajun French Virtual Table Française” and pointed me to a Reddit thread. What came back was more than what any scholarly journal could bring. It brought something older and more valuable: a community’s true, unadulterated memories. Hundreds of people responded. What follows are their oral histories.
The First Sip
The most striking thing about these testimonies is how many people cannot recall their first taste of coffee milk.
“I don't remember not having it," wrote Janet Schexnayder of Iberia Parish.
Most of the commenters recalled regularly sipping it before they could speak. Multiple respondents said they’d been given it in baby bottles, or have vague memories of dipping a demitasse spoon in coffee and sugar as an early introduction.
The average age of these first memories was around three to five years old, but the deeper truth is that coffee milk wasn't so much introduced as it was always simply present. Before Mass, after Mass, at veillées when company came over.
And for many, it still is. Charles VanWright shares it with his kids on Saturday mornings. Sarah Boudreaux's father-in-law teaches the grandchildren French while they drink theirs at five in the afternoon. Kristi Morton Miles still has her cowboy boot mug from childhood.
The Recipe
What is classified as “coffee milk” in Louisiana is pretty consistent across parishes: strong coffee, usually Community Coffee Dark Roast or Seaport or a chicory blend, diluted heavily with warm or hot milk and sweetened with cane sugar.
Some families used evaporated PET milk, especially in the country where fresh milk was historically harder to keep. Others used condensed milk or whole milk straight from the family cow. Tommy Guidry describes his family's café brûlée with caramelized sugar burned in a black pot, and strong coffee added until the foam settled, then milk poured in.
And then of course there was the dunking—buttered toast or biscuits crumbled into the cup and eaten with a spoon. Sometimes it was French bread toasted in the oven.
As kids got older, the ratio of coffee to milk would shift. "As I got older, the amount of milk reduced little by little, and soon I was having a full brew," wrote Victoria Anne Richard. Such a progression appears in story after story: the baby bottle, the sippy cup, the Tupperware tumbler, the demitasse, the full cup, and finally, in adulthood, just coffee.
The ‘Why’
This is where things got fascinating for me. Because, the thing is, when you’re a kid and you’re given something often enough, you never think to ask why. I, myself, am only asking now, and the people who served the coffee milk to us never explained. It was simply what you did. But when pressed to theorize on the reasoning behind serving a sugary, caffeinated mug of joe to young children, here were the folk conclusions:
Inclusion—the adults were having coffee and children wanted to be like adults, so adults created a version of the beverage children could partake in.
Danielle Blanchard Stafford from Mamou remembers thinking she was a "big girl" since she was drinking coffee, and another commenter Robyn Marie Underwood said she drank it because she wanted to be like her grandmother. Sydney-Angelle Dupléchin Boudreaux, from Evangeline Parish, captures the motive precisely: "Just milk wouldn't have let me partake in the coffee tradition. But black coffee would have been too strong."
It was also practical. Coffee was already made. The sugar was local, and as Max Gagnard noted, whole coffee beans and chicory bags were cheap, and the milk was usually free from the family cow.
The other part was for the ‘energy’ of the caffeine boost with the sugar to work in the fields,” said Ruby Lange Buchanan. “Always lots of sugar in the coffee milk; we were in the cotton or pepper rows by 6 am with our burlap sacks tied at our waist—not so fun this was, but lots of energy to do it with.”
There also seemed to be a belief that coffee milk could calm nerves. Several people report being told coffee milk was actually calming. Winnie McAdams says her husband's family believed it settled children before school. One Reddit commenter said they had it prescribed for childhood hyperactivity, and as John G. Fourcade jokes: "probably why we never needed ADHD medication!"
The Name Shift
The name, “coffee milk,” itself is also a crucial part of its history. Older respondents, and those from families where Cajun French was still spoken at home, called it café au lait. The shift to "coffee milk" in English tracks closely with the suppression of French in Louisiana schools—the generation that was punished for speaking French at school is largely the same that switched to the English name at home. As one commenter notes: "Got quite a few comments from older folks saying they called it café au lait before all the school drama introduced English as the main language for the kids."
The Road to Rhode Island
None of this explained coffee milk’s connection to Rhode Island, though. I called David Lanning, founder of Dave’s Coffee Syrup, one of the most popular coffee milk brands in The Ocean State. It turns out the Rhode Island version is a little different from ours, built around a sweetened concentrate stirred into cold milk, rather than brewed coffee diluted with warm milk. But the origin story is similar.
Rhode Island’s coffee milk is traced to Italian and Portuguese immigrant communities in the 1920s and 1930s, and Lanning’s theory about why it took hold there is the same I’d been thinking myself about Louisiana. These were all Western European families—French, Italian, Portuguese—who would give their children watered-down versions of their “adult drink” so that they could feel included, and they brought that tradition to the U.S. after they immigrated or were deported.
What cemented it in Rhode Island specifically, Lanning believes, was Prohibition. Without alcohol, people leaned harder into other pleasures. Coffee drinks surged in popularity across the United States, and some of those early versions likely carried an extra kick.
But why didn’t the Rhode Island coffee milk tradition extend to places like New York or New Jersey, where the Italian immigration population is just as large?
Maybe it was the concentration. Rhode Island is a small, insular state where a community tradition can more easily become a regional identity than in a sprawling area like New York state or New Jersey.
And if that's the case, it may very well be the thread that connects a place like Providence to Acadiana—two tight-knit communities holding onto what the wider world let go.
Read more entries of Megan Broussard Maughan's column, “In Search of the Lost Tongue,” at countryroadsmag.com.
