Coffee and Cream

 

 

 

Coffee and cream (not milk!). One of the great pairings of all time. Like Bogie and Bacall, Lucy and Ricky, Crosby and Hope, Roger Williams and any piano, Brooks and Dunn, Sinatra and a microphone, Christmas and snow. Admittedly, most Georgians know little about the latter, but we watch movies, and we can imagine how it might be. Just because we never see it doesn’t mean that it’s not a great combination.

 

I like coffee. It’s low carb and low calorie and takes the edge off so that I won’t be munching on stuff that I shouldn’t. Of course, at the moment I’m doing both, but that’s beside the point. I could easily face the day without coffee, but I hope that I never have to.

 

Cream lightens your coffee without watering it down and makes it taste better. Decaf coffee is better these days than it used to be, when it tasted more like water that Fred Sanford might have washed his socks in. Coffee like that is fit only to remove rust from a cast iron railing. Put Half & Half in it, and that’s still its highest and best use. Put in a little cream, however, and you can probably actually drink it, should you be so inclined. Of course, if there is any left over, you can still use it to remove rust from cast iron railing.

 

That’s how I got started using cream in my coffee. High octane gave me acid reflux, so I had to go to unleaded . The gasoline metaphor is well-worn, but still cute. It’s not so cute, though, when the coffee actually tastes like gasoline. A little cream makes coffee like that taste almost like coffee, and that’s a blessing. It’s also a good lesson for coffee shops to learn. Want to have people rave about your coffee? Then make real cream available, and gently suggest that they use it.

 

When we talk about beautiful complexions, we say “peaches and cream” or “coffee and cream”. You never heard anybody compare a person’s complexion to “coffee and Half & Half” or “coffee and milk” and for good reason. Next time you put H&H or milk in your coffee, take a look, and you’ll see why. If you want to say that someone’s skin is as ugly as muddy water, and make them think you’re paying them a compliment, then compare it to coffee and H&H.

 

Yesterday, I ruined about sixteen ounces of, not good but decent, decaf coffee. I filled my cup with the last in the pot and then reached in the fridge for my pint of cream, grabbed it, and poured in what I thought was about the right amount. Then, I tasted it, and it had a nasty kind of sickly sweet taste. “Too long in the pot,” I thought. A little more cream would fix it. So I poured in a little more. Still nasty. And then a little more. Still nasty. Not only was the taste off, but the color, instead of being that pretty creamy-tan, looked more like something you might find in a sewer, and I had put in more than twice the cream that I usually use. So I disposed of the coffee, lamenting not the loss of the coffee but that I had wasted so much cream, and determined to give that pot a good washing.

 

Then I opened the fridge to put my cream back, and, there on the shelf where my pint of cream always resides was . . . my pint of cream. So I looked at the container still in my hand, and, as you’ve probably guessed, it was a pint of Half & Half. It was stuck in there by my daughter when she had been there earlier cooking something or other with her mother. That was welcome news, because I had not, after all, wasted a single drop of that precious bovine goodness down the drain. Plus, I could probably let that pot go another six months.

 

So, to all of those errant children out there, here’s your lesson for today:  Never, ever, buy Half & Half. Use, instead, all cream or, if you must, half cream and half water or milk. Trust me. Whatever you’re putting it in will be the better for it.

 

And, to other coffee drinkers I make this promise:  Try real cream in your coffee, and you’ll never again settle for anything less.

P.S.
If you are of a parsimonious nature, as I am, and people sometimes say that you would have made Jack Benny look like a philanthropist, but you can’t help being thrifty because it’s in your genes, I would remind you that you will use much less cream than you would use either milk or H&H.