Adam Chanes of New York City, who at age 11 is probably the youngest person ever to address a query to this column, recently returned from a vacation in Israel with his parents. While he was there he asked me why, when Israelis order coffee in a café, they often ask for kaffei hafukh, which means, literally, “upside-down coffee.”
My first thought was to say to Adam:
“Kaffei hafukh is what Americans — at least since Starbucks came along — would call a café latte. Generally, you make a latte by adding steamed milk to a cup of espresso, but there are people who pour the milk into the cup first and add the espresso afterward. Probably that’s the way it was once made in cafés in Israel, and since the coffee was added to the milk, and not the milk to the coffee, it was called ‘upside-down coffee.’”
But later, when I ran this explanation by my Israeli-born daughter, who is a coffee lover and maven, she pooh-poohed it. “In the first place,” she said, “what you get in Israeli cafés today when you ask for a kaffei hafukh is usually a cappuccino and not a latte — and no one ever makes cappuccino by pouring the milk first. And secondly, kaffei hafukh is an old expression in Hebrew. It must go back to a time when espresso machines didn’t exist in Israel, decades before drinks like cappuccino and café latte started appearing in Israeli cafés. If you ask me, kaffei hafukh got its name not from the order in which the coffee and milk were poured but from their proportions, and it must have referred to neither a latte nor a cappuccino but a café au lait.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked. Being a coffee lover, too, but obviously not a maven, I had always assumed that café latte and café au lait were simply the Italian and French terms for the same thing.
“Café latte,” my daughter explained, “is like a cappuccino, with more milk and less foam added to the espresso. In both of them, the milk is made to foam in a special steamer, and unless you’re willing to do without the foam entirely on the latte, the milk has to be added last to it, too. But café au lait isn’t made with espresso or an espresso machine at all. It’s made with brewed coffee, prepared in a drip coffee maker, and the milk isn’t steamed. It’s scalded in a saucepan on a stove — that is, brought to the boiling point without letting it boil — and mixed with the coffee, usually with more milk than coffee. There’s no foam, so it doesn’t matter in which order you pour them. Some people even pour both at the same time. Kaffei hafukh probably started out as café au lait and was called ‘upside-down’ because it had more milk than coffee in it, not because the milk was poured first.”
“But you said that kaffei hafukh in Israel today is cappuccino and not café au lait,” I protested.
“Yes,” my daughter said. “Unless you’re served a latte instead. The coffee in Israeli cafés is very good, but there’s a lot of confusion about terminology. Cappuccino and latte were never drunk here much before the 1980s. When they began to be, the term kaffei hafukh was transferred to them from ‘café au lait.’”
And so I now had two explanations of kaffei hafukh for Adam Chanes, and I wasn’t sure which was the right one. On the one hand, my daughter is certainly more knowledgeable about coffee than I am. But on the other hand, if the term kaffei hafukh has been around in Israel for a long time, espresso machines have been, also. The expression dor ha-espresso, “the espresso generation,” was already being used in the early ’60s to describe degenerate Israeli youth that preferred spending their time in Tel Aviv cafés rather than making the desert bloom in kibbutzim. Why, then, did it take so long for kaffei hafukh to lose its original meaning?
“Probably because,” my daughter said, “until then, Israelis only drank straight espresso. It wasn’t until the 1980s that they began to travel widely in Europe and to pick up the cappuccino and latte habit.”
That’s when I had an idea. Who was it, I asked myself, who must have first brought the culture of European-style cafés to Zionist Palestine, which until then had been either Eastern European and tea drinking, or Middle Eastern and Turkish coffee drinking? The answer is the German Jews, or “Yekkes,” as they were colloquially known, who began arriving in large numbers in the ’30s. Could it be that kaffei hafukh was a Hebrew translation of a concept that they brought with them from Germany?
I took a German dictionary down from my shelf and looked for verkehrte Kaffee, which is “upside-down coffee” in German. Sure enough, there it was: Verkehrte Kaffee — wenig Kaffee mit viel Milch, “a small amount of coffee with a lot of milk.” My daughter was right. The original kaffei hafukh was café au lait.
And there, Adam, is your answer. Verkehrte kaffee was the German version of the French café au lait; brought to Palestine by German immigrants, it became kaffei hafukh in Hebrew; as long as Israelis drank their espresso exclusively black, kaffei hafukh remained café au lait; when they switched to espresso-and-hot-milk blends, such as cappuccino and latte,* kaffei hafukh* switched with them. When you’re old enough to drink coffee, you’ll taste the difference.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Copyright © 2013, Forward Association, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Ethical Kosher Seal Stalls Amid Orthodox Opposition
Rama Burshtein Offers Rare Glimpse of Orthodox World
'War' With Ultra-Orthodox at Kotel? Bring It On
Claims Conference Chief Knew of $57M Holocaust Fraud Probe Earlier 
You've successfully signed up!
I know in Dutch a strong coffee with milk is referred to koffee verkehrt which in translation is more or less 'coffee upside-down'.
Strangely, this is in fact Dutch (koffie verkeerd) and Austrian (Verkehrter) - I'm not aware of the expression being used in between in big Germany. That my wife never misunderstood 'kafeafukh' as one of those Fourbucks novelties might be because of her Czernovitz family background. A variety in Israel is instant coffee, preferrably the characteristic Elite kind we all love and hate, made with milk instead of water. The differences between cappuccino, caffè/espresso macchiato, latte macchiato and caffè latte are mainly about stiff vs. soupy froth and their ratio, the amount of milk etc. Café au lait is often used to imply filter rather than espresso coffee. Of course, it rather starts than stop there. "Caffè latte" is not really an Italian expression, where people might ask for a cappuccino senza spuma, and the classical American mistake is to order a latte, and be served exactly that - a glass of milk.
In Cuba, many years ago a cafe con leche was called "sube y baja" The reason? The waiter had two pitchers, one with milk in one hand, and one with coffee in the other. When he served, one hand went up, and then the other.
My experience with Israeli cafes goes back to my days as a student at the Hebrew University in the mid-70's. My recollection is that most, if not all, of the good coffee shops were indeed owned and operated by immigrants from Germany and Austria (and perhaps German speakers from such places as Czechoslovakia). That makes the sensible etymology proposed by Philologos even more persuasive.
Dear Philologus I enjoyed reading your columns arguing for an already existing Judeo-English. However I disagree. I believe that my thesis as to English speaking Jewry being so divorced from the base Jewish culture and Hebrew language beeinah omedet Halevei that American Jews used a language that contain 2-3% Jewishly related words.. I used Yiddishisms and phrases in my previous correspondence with you only because I knew that you would understand them. The pool of people who speak Yiddish, or even just passively understand the language, is fast dwindling. Kol bar bei rav knows that the younger generation of Jews today understands Yiddish as much as I understand Mandarin Chinese. Unfortunately, there is a far greater chance of my learning Mandarin than my children and their friends learning even a modicum of Yiddish. Forty years ago, in graduate school, I was speaking to some Brooklyn-born American Jews. I said something like "That fellow is unelectable. He's too pareve." They looked perplexed. While a few knew the word "pareve" in its dietary context, none of them could follow its extended usage. That was forty years ago when Jewish culture and the Hebrew language had not atrophied among American Jews to the extent it has today. It is a kal vechomer- oops another Judeo-English phrase – how such usages would be received today. Let's face it. Hebrew and Jewish culture are gosessim, if not already completely dead, to most American Jews. Apparently, my definition of Judeo-English is not quite the same as yours. You equate the existence of some Yiddishisms, Yiddish pronunciation and Yiddish transmutations and the like within the speech of a small group of Orthodox Jews as arguing for the existence of a Judeo-English. I do not. I believe that Yiddish is a Jewish language only because it drew from the base culture and language. That language is Hebrew. Aramaic may be the only other acceptable source for the creation of a Jewish language. Biblical and Talmudic Aramaic literature was the heritage of all previous Jewries irrespective of the time period of their existence and their location on the planet. Yiddish, on the other hand, because of the size of the population that spoke it, may have pride of place, but it was not, and is not, the cultural inheritance of all of the world's Jewries. From my perspective, only the language and culture common to all Jewries, and not a derivative one like Yiddish, can serve as the source for a new Jewish language. Almost two decades ago, I was speaking with a former editor of Hadoar or Habitzaron, I forget which one. He was one of the important figures active in attempting to keep Hebrew alive in America. He said to me back then that one of the great ironies in Jewish history was that 40-45 years [back around 1990] after the creation of the State of Israel fewer people in America (let's not count the yordim) had a working knowledge of Hebrew than before the creation of the State. Can there really be a Judeo-English if the base language has effectively withered away? I am well aware of the argot, patois, jargon, or what have you that Orthodox Jews speak in America today. However, they are a small insular group within a much larger Jewish population. Anything they speak can not be considered as being Judeo-English since it has little or no following in the larger Jewish population. The likelihood that they will influence the 85-90% of American Jews who are not Orthodox to speak Yeshivish is in my opinion slim to none. Meye nafkah minah as to whether there exists or does not exist a Judeo-English? The nafkah minah is in the litmus test it provides as to whether Jews in America will survive as Jews. If there is a Judeo-English that exists or develops and thrives, Jews will stave off assimilation. If such a language neither exists nor develops, the fate of Alexandrian Jewry awaits them. Thank you for your thoughts and time. It is always a pleasure to read your column. Sincerely Irving Treitel
In (swiss) French, a latte is a "renverse" = reversed.