When I was a kid attending Catholic school in Rhode Island, during lunchtime in the cafeteria we were offered a choice of milk: whole milk, chocolate milk or coffee milk. If we know each other, I’ve told you this. Being from Rhode Island is the only interesting thing about me. So I mention it all the time. That invariably leads to coffee milk, which the Rhode Island General Assembly designated as the official state drink in 1993, and is something of a regional curiosity even among the rest of close-knit New England.
Chicago, I am telling you this because you’ve watched your edible quirks jump state lines and lead to misunderstandings: When tourists aren’t around, you eat way more tavern-style pizza than deep dish, and despite the plot of “The Bear,” Italian beef is a once-in-a-blue-moon indulgence for many of us and nothing like a go-to everyday lunch.
Chicago, I am telling you this because Dunkin’ just introduced coffee milk to Illinois.
Actually, it offered coffee milk to the entire nation at once, courtesy of its new fall menu. Seeing it on a drive-thru screen the other day, I was startled, delighted — then uneasy.
Here was an international corporation (albeit one rooted in New England), deciding unilaterally to spread a regional secret, one that for the past century or so has been a distinctly Rhode Islanders-only treat, thank you. To get ahead of the confusion sure to result, I figured I’d explain — except Dunkin’, anticipating the nose crinkles, is already explaining. They hired Kristen Wiig to be the spokesperson for their new Dunkalatte, which the company describes as “unlike anything else,” coffee milk paired with espresso, “an ultra-smooth drink that sips like a latte and tastes like a melty milkshake.”
They seem to be going out of the way to apologize for how weird the idea of coffee milk sounds. In the TV spot, an actress playing a Dunkin’ executive declares the drink “hard to explain but delicious,” which leads to Wiig vamping: “I’ll say! I work here and I don’t even know what this is!” All of which builds to a CGI animal, “the mythical Coffee Milk Cow,” the fabled source of coffee milk. If you go to Dunkin’s website, they are already selling stuffed Coffee Milk Cows, along with Dunkalatte hoodies, hats and sweatpants.
It’s quite the coming-out party.
To make matters worse, the Dunkalatte is good. I can’t complain: It’s not as cozy as the Rhody classic — it’s overcast white with a sharp bite as opposed to deep khaki with a smokey richness — but it is the tastiest new coffee drink Dunkin’ has introduced in years. I feel like my favorite local indie band just sold out, went national — and still sounded fine.
A little light fades out of the world when you need only visit a strip mall in Schaumburg to sample what remains of regional American traditions.
But then, regional foodway traditions never did recognize borders. I’ve had respectable deep dish in Manhattan, and memorable guacamole far from California. Though for ages, if you knew anyone from Rhode Island, chances are you heard about local food customs that even neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut considered exotic.
Specifically, dishes that emerged in southern New England because of late 19th century and early 20th century immigration, often from a handful of the same Italian villages. Broadly, this meant peasant foods, old country recipes recasted for the frugality of New World lifestyles. Another iconic R.I. drink, Del’s Lemonade, was born from immigrants who would leave the rinds in the slush. Now I see it in Wisconsin. Pizza strips — so associated with Rhody that gas stations sell them beside cash registers — are cheese-less pizzas with often sweet, chunky tomato sauces, left all day at room temperature, just out sitting on that counter, the way pizza is served in parts of Sicily. You can find a version in Italian bakeries across the Midwest. Rhode Island clam chowder, much thinner than classic New England white clam chowders, was likely the result of local fishermen favoring clam broth and salt pork to the expense of dense, rich creams.
That, I haven’t seen in Chicago yet.
Likewise, the only place I’ve spotted coffee milk in the Midwest was Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which specializes in regional favorites. The origin of coffee milk is unclear, but the most common explanation sounds probable: Italian immigrants in Providence, who frequented pharmacy lunch counters, introduced the practice of boiling down used coffee grounds with sugar, creating a syrup for stirring into cold milk. By the 1930s, this practice was standardized by regional businesses that sold bottles of coffee syrups — Autocrat, founded in 1895, remains the gold standard. After school, I often made myself a glass of coffee milk, squirting a generous amount of syrup into a glass and stirring. To this day, no true Rhode Islander is without a bottle of Autocrat (which, even in Chicago, because of Amazon, is never more than 24 hours away).
“Rhody classic reinvented” is how Dunkin’ is advertising its own version of coffee milk — indeed, created from its own syrup recipe, a spokesperson said, “made by blending whole milk with Dunkin’s very own coffee extract” — but what they don’t say is that mere miles outside of Rhode Island, in the south suburbs of Boston, no one’s heard of the stuff. Just last month, the Boston Globe ran a story asking: “Why are Rhode Island’s iconic foods so weird?” Offered a glass of coffee milk on his talk show last spring, Seth Meyers, who grew up in nearby New Hampshire, admitted that he had never heard of it.
That gives me hope for regional tastes.
Maybe Rhode Island — origin of H.P. Lovecraft and his horror weirdos, birthplace of Talking Heads and its rock weirdness, summer home of Taylor Swift of all people — is still too random for prime time, a microscopic overlooked coast perfectly fine remaining overlooked. Or maybe the Dunkalatte — which, for authenticity’s sake, needs to be ordered cold — breaks Rhody cuisine nationwide. Either way, by mid-October, just in time for Halloween, Dunkin’ is unveiling a Potion Macchiato, which it describes as espresso and marshmallow ube — the purple yam associated with Filipino cuisine.
That should take the heat off.