café au lait

plural cafés au lait · plural proscribed sometimes café au laits · alternative cafe au lait · alternative coffee au lait

1. uncountableCoffee mixed with hot milk as a drink; white coffee; (countable) a serving of this.

   But here comes the caffé au lait, and I have ſcarce time to huddle on my things.

   1769, Eugenius [pseudonym], “The Negotiation”, in Yorick’s Sentimental Journey, Continued. […], volume III, London: […] S[amuel] Bladon, […], →OCLC, page 9

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   Good night for to-night—oh! I forgot—pray send me some café au lait: the Duc de Picquigny [Louis Joseph d'Albert, 6th Duke of Chaulnes] (who by the way is somebody's son, as I thought) takes it for snuff, and says it is the new fashion at Paris; I suppose they drink rappee after dinner.

   1763 October 18 (date written), Horace Walpole, “To the Earl of Hertford [Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford]”, in Mrs. Paget Toynbee [i.e., Helen Wrigley], editor, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford […], volume V (1760–1764), Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, published 1904, →OCLC, page 382

   By my side was the empty bowl in which the concierge had brought me my café au lait and the fragment of croissant which I had not had appetite enough to eat. I heard the concierge in the next room emptying my bath.

   1919, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter XXXIV, in The Moon and Sixpence, [New York, N.Y.]: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers […], →OCLC, page 175

   We stopped for coffee au lait near the old French Market, took a walk out to the levee and then back to the Court of the Three Sisters to sit out under the trees, drink beer and talk fencing until the moon began to yawn.

   1940 October, Dernell Every, “The Editor Goes Roaming: Fencing in New Orleans, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Portland”, in Dernell Every, editor, The Riposte, volume 5, number 5 (number 58 overall), New York, N.Y.: [s.n.], →OCLC, page 3, column 2

   They were hungry for breakfast which they ate at the cafe, ordering brioche and café au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement.

   a. 1962 (date written), Ernest Hemingway, chapter 1, in The Garden of Eden, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, published May 1986, →ISBN, page 4

   It was like using a language I'd once known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long before passed out of the world: café au lait at an outdoor table, with a brioche, absinthe in a tall glass, or shrimp in a cornucopia of newspaper; things I'd once read about but had never seen.

   1985, Margaret Atwood, “Soul Scrolls”, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, →ISBN, page 164

   Synonyms: café con leche, caffè latte, latte

2. uncountableCoffee and hot milk served in separate jugs as a breakfast drink; (countable) a serving of this.

   Café au Lait (Coffee with Milk).— […] Take three pints of good, freshly and thoroughly heated milk (but do not boil it), pour it into a hot pitcher, send to the table with six hot cups à café au lait, pouring into each cup half coffee and half milk.

   1889, Alessandro Filippini, “Recipes”, in The Table: How to Buy Food, How to Cook It, and How to Serve It, New York, N.Y.: Charles L[uther] Webster & Company, paragraph 1351, page 381

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   Celeste would bring in a silver coffeepot holding two cups of strong black coffee; a lidded porcelain jug with a large quantity of boiled milk; and a croissant, always from the same bakery, served on its own saucer. Wordlessly, she would place these items on a bedside table and leave [Marcel] Proust alone to prepare his own café au lait.

   2013, Mason Currey, “Marcel Proust (1871–1922)”, in Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (A Borzoi Book), New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →ISBN, page 88

3. uncountableA light brown colour like that of coffee with milk.

   Among other monochrome shades of this class, found on highly fired Chinese porcelain, are brown ochre, café au lait, chestnut, capuchin, maroon, dead-leaf (feuille morte), chocolate, bronze, lac-colored (almost black), etc. The darker shades are often highly iridescent.

   [1897], Oriental Ceramic Art: Collection of W[illiam] T[hompson] Walters […], New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton & Company, →OCLC, page 274

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   Seen all of a piece like this, in a picture that fits snugly into the lens of any camera, Kersey is a peaceful, multi-coloured Toytown of a village, whose red-tiled roofs are subdued by just the right amount of weathering and lichen, and whose overhanging gables thrust forward in a quiet brilliance of red-and-yellow ochre, pink, white and café-au-lait.

   1980, Richard Adams [et al.], “Kersey, Suffolk”, in Book of British Villages: A Guide to 700 of the Most Interesting and Attractive Villages in Britain, London: Drive Publications for the Automobile Association, →OCLC, page 240, column 1

comparative more café au lait · superlative most café au lait

1. Of a light brown colour like that of coffee with milk.

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   Tripod Censer (Ting Lu), of depressed globular form, rounding in to a wide, circular mouth, supported upon three feet of scrolled outline, which spring from the gaping mouths of grotesque lions' heads projecting from the lower surface of the bowl. […] The base is unglazed, with the exception of a round patch of the café-au-lait enamel in the middle.

   1899, S[tephen] W[ootton] Bushell, “Appendix. Descriptive List of the Illustrations.”, in Oriental Ceramic Art: Collection of W[illiam] T[hompson] Walters: Text Edition to Accompany the Complete Work, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, pages 778–779

   1. Of a person: having skin of a light brown colour; also, of a person's skin: having this colour; often (potentially offensive) due to mixed black and white parentage or ancestry.

      Thin café au lait children trailed smaller brothers and sisters; on the veranda of one of the little semidetached houses a lean light-coloured man in shirtsleeves was shouting, in Afrikaans, at a fat woman who sat on the steps.

      1956, Nadine Gordimer, “The Smell of Death and Flowers”, in Six Feet of the Country: Short Stories, London: Victor Gollancz, →OCLC, page 213

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      A White and Negro married, producing mulatto (café au lait) children. One of these married another mulatto and had a large family—one child much whiter than either parent, one much blacker, and the rest an assortment of varying coffee shades. […] Both the mulattoes, therefore, have six black genes and six white; but each of their children is likely to get a different assortment—one with eight black genes and four white; the second, the opposite; a third, half and half (like the parents); a fourth, eleven white genes and only one black—and so on. Straightforward cases of this sort are called cumulative genes.

      1935, Eldon Moore, “Heredity: The Stream of Life”, in A[rthur] H[ugh] G[arfit] Alston, editor, The Science of Living Things: Botany: Zoology: Anatomy: Physiology, London: Odhams Press […], →OCLC, page 475

   2. medicineOf patches or spots on the skin: of a light brown colour which is darker than the surrounding skin, characteristic of certain diseases such as neurofibromatosis type I.

      He [R. W. Taylor] thought […] that roseola was often followed very quickly by pigmentation, and mentioned a case in Charity Hospital, in which café-au-lait spots followed a delicate roseola within a week.

      1878 October, R. W. Taylor, “Proceedings of Societies. American Dermatological Association. Second Annual Meeting. Official Report of the Proceedings by the Secretary, Dr. R. W. Taylor.”, in James B. Hunter, editor, New York Medical Journal: A Monthly Record of Medicine and the Collateral Sciences, volume XXVIII, number 4, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton & Company, […], →ISSN, →OCLC, page 393

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      She slept deeply awhile, then was restlessly awake for hours; and slept again in the early morning before Dubin awoke. He left her lying on her stomach, wound in a sheer nightgown, the coffee au lait birthmark on her buttock a blemished island, visible when it was too hot for sheet or blanket.

      1979, Bernard Malamud, chapter 1, in Dubin’s Lives, New York, N.Y.: Farrar Straus Giroux, →ISBN, page 15