Sunday, October 3, 2010

Happy Sunday

A quick breakfast before a long and happy Sunday: a lagrima and a just ripe nectarine. Lagrima in Spanish means “teardrop”, in Argentina, it is a drink of hot milk with a teaspoon or so – a warm teardrop – of strong coffee. It is a drink, I believe, mostly for children: when adults take their late afternoon mate, kids in Argentina “tomar la leche”, that is, drink milk. Though frankly, the lagrima is featured on every standard Argentine café menu (like pizza and empanadas and the odd-sounding and odd-looking ensalada rusa), so perhaps there is a solid group of grown ups somewhere drinking lagrimas while watching soccer on flat screen TVs.

The recipe is hardly a recipe: it’s steamed milk (I heat mine on a hot burner in a small saucepan) with a spoonful or two of hot coffee. For sweetness, you could do as the Argentines do and dump in a hacky sack-sized packet of sugar, or take a smoother route: I like to add a bit of simple syrup, as to not have granules of stray sugar in my last teardrops of coffee.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jolan, your sentiments about Lágrima and a splash of something is shared beyond Argentina to include Spain, Mexico and basically anywhere the language is spoken. It was inspiration for the name of our little vanilla company too: http://lagrima.com. Just thought I share since we came across your post.

    ReplyDelete