Cortadito

The cortadito is the Cuban take on the Spanish cortado – espresso “cut” with milk – but sweetened, Cuban-style. It starts with café Cubano: dark-roast coffee brewed strong in an espresso machine or stovetop cafetera. The first concentrated drops are whipped hard with sugar into a pale, caramel-coloured paste called espumita, and the rest of the coffee is stirred in, leaving a light foam on top.

Then comes the milk: steamed or warmed milk, usually in roughly equal measure to the coffee (some places use more coffee, some a little more milk). Many Miami cafés use evaporated milk, which makes it richer. The result is small, sweet, strong and creamy – sweeter and bolder than a European cortado.

In Miami the cortadito is part of daily life: it’s ordered at ventanitas, walk-up coffee windows at Cuban bakeries and restaurants, often with a pastelito or croqueta. Order a “cortado” in Miami and you may well be handed a cortadito.

The cortado – espresso “cut” with a little milk – comes from Spain, and the idea of cutting coffee with milk travelled to Cuba during the colonial period. In Cuba, a sugar-growing island, coffee came to be drunk heavily sweetened, and the sugar-whipped café Cubano, with its espumita, became the base for a distinctly Cuban small milk coffee: the cortadito.

When large numbers of Cubans settled in Miami from the late 1950s and 1960s, they brought their coffee culture with them. Walk-up windows called ventanitas at Cuban cafés and bakeries in Little Havana and beyond made the cafecito and cortadito an everyday ritual for the whole city. Versailles, opened in Little Havana in 1971, is one of the best-known places to order one.

Exact dates for when the cortadito first appeared in Cuba are not well documented.