What if the cappuccino you had this morning was not, in fact, a cappuccino? Scary. More worrisome still: What if your flat white was?
There was a time when cappuccino was easy to identify. It was a shot of espresso with steamed milk and a meringuelike milk foam on top. But now the onetime king of specialty coffee drinks is having a bit of an identity crisis.
Even among experts, there is considerable disagreement concerning what exactly a cappuccino is, with some of those in the know focusing on the size of the drink as its distinguishing characteristic.
“In the U.S., cappuccino are small, medium and large, and that actually doesn’t exist,” the food and coffee writer Oliver Strand said. “Cappuccino is basically a 4-ounce drink.”
Todd Carmichael, a founder of La Colombe, a coffee roasting company with cafes in New York and other cities, is not so hung up on the ounce factor.
“We’ve made the cappuccino mobile,” he said. “With 8 to 10 ounces, the flavors do not go away. They’re just less intense.”
Others cling to old-school notions of what makes a cappuccino, with the layering of ingredients as the main thing.
“The goal is to serve three distinct layers: caffè, hot milk and frothy (not dense) foam,” the chef and writer Mario Batali wrote in an email. “But to drink it Italian style, it will be stirred so that the three stratum come together as one."
With the stirring of the drink, one may see the distinctive red-brown color similar to that of the habits worn by men belonging to the Order of Capuchin Friars Minor, a resemblance believed by some to have given the beverage its name.
Joe, a cafe with 13 locations in New York and Philadelphia, serves a cappuccino that is not layered, with no bubbly foam on top.
“The consistency should be the same from the first sip to the last,” said Jonathan Rubenstein, one of Joe’s founders.
The Joe version would seem to violate the cappuccino standards put forth by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) and its Barista Guild, which advocate a 1 cm layer, minimum, of milky foam.
Only 1 centimeter? Sounds dangerously close to a latte. But who would know better than the SCAA?
“It’s kind of ridiculous,” said David Schomer, the founder of Espresso Vivace in Seattle.
Some coffee specialists pointed to “latte art creep” as responsible for the small amount of foam in the modern-day cappuccino, noting that it is easier for baristas to make intricate designs with less froth in a time of Instagram-ready food and drink.
Given the changes in what constitutes a cappuccino, some people may find themselves with an attachment to an incarnation of the drink that was in style when they came of coffee-drinking age.
“Back in 1985, the best cappuccino was the one with 5-inch mounds of froth sprinkled with cinnamon,” the restaurateur Daniel Meyer wrote by email. “We gave up on foam in 2006.”
Carmichael of La Colombe recalled the cappuccino at an influential cafe in Seattle, Torrefazione Italia, long before specialty coffee drinks were common.
“Cappuccino was coffee with really thick meringue-type foam,” he said. “You could set an olive on it and it wouldn’t sink.”
Kenneth Nye, who founded the East Village cafe Ninth Street Espresso in 2001, grew so sick of customers’ insistence on what they believed to be a “real” cappuccino that he removed all the drink names from his menus.
“All it says is ‘espresso with milk,'” Nye said. “We stopped with the names because it’s all silly.”
The new enthusiasm for the flat white, a drink made of espresso and milk that seems to have originated in Australia or New Zealand, is particularly nettlesome to Nye.
“You put 10 people in a room who claim to be an authority on the flat white, you’re going to get at least five different opinions on what it should be,” he said. “People are trying to make the whole process intimidating to the consumer.”
Not everyone who cares about such matters has adopted Nye’s heck-with-it attitude toward coffee taxonomy. The Instituto Nazionale Espresso Italian, for one, calls for “25 ml espresso and 100 ml steam-foamed milk.”
Coffee lovers in Italy believe so strongly in the idea of an authentic cappuccino that in 2007, the head of the nation’s commission on agriculture, Marco Lion, proposed government certification for cafes that make the drink the right way. (The government was dissolved before any action could be taken.) But the notion of an Italian ideal is dismissed by others.
“Even in Italy, it varies,” Nye said. “The one commonality was that it was small and considered a morning drink.”
The drink’s origins are likely Austrian, said Andy Smith, a culinary historian at the New School. It went mainstream with the rise of Starbucks, which Howard Schultz bought and began expanding (along with the sizing of cappuccino) in the late 1980s.
“They should be given some credit,” Smith said.
Perhaps the best cappuccino is made without the fancy barista work or other trappings.
“For perfection,” Batali said, “see the Italian roadside version of fast food, the Autogrill.”
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