Café Central in Málaga had a tiled sign with nine coffees in two rows, the solo at the top, the nube at the bottom, and the difference between them was the milk. The café closed in January 2022, after more than a hundred years on the Plaza de la Constitución, and the nine names have outlived it, because a coffee brand that was not even the Central's regular supplier spread them around the city.
The owner, José Prado Crespo, came up with them in the fifties. Coffee was scarce after the war, and he was tired of pouring coffee away because every customer wanted a different ratio of coffee to milk. So he took the orders that came up most often and gave them names: solo is black, mitad half and half, sombra a shadow of coffee in the milk, nube a cloud, almost all milk.
The cortado exists all over the country. Cortado means cut. An espresso cut with a little more than two teaspoons of warm milk, just enough to take the bitterness away, in the small cup. In Catalonia they say tallat, in the Basque Country ebaki.
Valencia has the bombón, espresso on sweetened condensed milk, served in a clear glass so you can see the two layers. And in summer the coffee there comes to the table twice, as a cup of café solo and next to it a glass of ice cubes; you stir the sugar into the hot cup, because it dissolves better there, then pour the coffee over the ice yourself, and sometimes there is a slice of lemon in the glass. Café del tiempo, coffee for the weather.
The coffee in many Spanish bars is roasted with sugar. It is called torrefacto, up to 15 kilos of sugar per 100 kilos of green coffee, added shortly before the end of the roast, and it leaves the beans with a glaze. The process has been patented since 1901. It was a cheap way of keeping beans, and after the civil war, when coffee was scarce, it had its great years. In the bars today it runs blended, a fifth to a half torrefacto on normally roasted coffee.
After lunch, nobody gets up
Lunch in Spain is around half past two. Part of that is the clock: since the forties the country has run on Central European Time, although geographically it belongs with Greenwich, so by the sun it is only between one and two at lunchtime. After the meal nobody gets up. The coffee arrives, sometimes with a small liqueur or an aguardiente, and people stay seated and talk. The Spanish call it sobremesa, staying at the table, and the hour after lunch is one of the most important slots in Spanish television. In Italy the coffee after a meal is drunk in a minute, as in A Minute at the Bar; in Spain it lasts as long as the sobremesa lasts.
There are enough bars for it: 431 per 100,000 inhabitants, five times as many as schools.
At the Coffee Bar at home
Put the warm milk in a jug next to the machine on the Coffee Bar, and everyone cuts their own coffee, with two teaspoons or with a cloud, as on the sign in Málaga. What that place looks like at ours is in Where the First Coffee Stands. In summer a glass of ice belongs next to the cup, and because a glass has no handle, it does not hang on the cup rail. It stands on a board, with the other glasses.
And the coffee after lunch. Make it at the Coffee Bar, carry the cups to the table and leave them there.
Clearing up happens at dinner time, and in Spain that is after nine.