Coffee Soup and Hot Toddies

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Kathy Martin, and I’m from Lexington, Kentucky.

Hey, Kathy, we’re glad to have a fellow Kentuckian, or I’m a fellow Kentuckian.

Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you.

I’ve been thinking about something in my childhood.

When I visited my grandparents in Meadville, Pennsylvania, or actually it was Blooming Valley, Pennsylvania, they would have a treat, and I thought they called it Potty Tooty.

And it was toast with cream, I’m sure fresh cream from the cow, and sugar and cinnamon.

And then they would put coffee on it.

And I was, I cannot find it anywhere.

And I was wondering if you had ever heard of it.

Now, I’m trying to picture this.

It’s a piece of toast with coffee and cream poured on it?

Yes.

It was like a special snack and sugar.

Okay.

Okay.

And you called it a hottie-tutie, like H-O-T-T-Y-T-O-O-T-I-E, something like that?

I would think.

Okay, yeah.

Oh, I think we’ve got answers for you here.

Oh, that’s exciting.

But let’s explore that name first.

Hottie-tutie is probably just related to hottie-totty, or hot toddy, you know, the alcoholic drink.

We just had a lot of different spellings and variants over the long years and is usually spelled with hot with T’s and the toddy part with D’s.

Hotty tootty isn’t a name that I’ve come across, but I don’t think it’s a stretch because that toddy part kind of becomes a generic for any kind of drink, whether or not it has alcohol.

But the definitive part of the hot toddy was alcoholic.

But so toddy just kind of stands in for any drink.

But I’m also maybe more interested in the food part of this because what you’re describing, so bread with cinnamon and sugar and cream and then coffee poured on top, is amazingly like what is known as coffee soup in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Sometimes called coffee soup, K-F-F-I-S-U-P-P.

And so it might be pieces of bread or toast broken up and put into coffee, or it might be hot, sweetened coffee poured over cubed pieces of toast in a cup.

Sometimes you use stale bread.

Sometimes you use fresh bread.

Sometimes it’s toasted.

Sometimes you have milk and sugar.

Sometimes it’s just a poor food for when you’re really poor.

So you use stale bread and coffee, and that’s it.

That’s your meal.

And some people have really strong memories of having coffee soup.

Or another version is cracker soup.

Crackers crumbled into water or milk if you could afford it.

So, yeah, it’s a thing.

Many, many versions of that dish, sometimes called bread soup or cracker soup, but usually coffee soup.

Well, Catherine, I’m curious how you would eat it.

I mean, because what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a soup to me.

No, it’d be on a saucer.

And actually, as I think about it, I’m not sure there was cinnamon in it.

But anyway, they would put it on a sauce or a plate.

And I think they would eat it like with a spoon or a fork or a knife, cut it up.

Yeah, that sounds about it.

Yeah, usually you’ll find that with these pass-along dishes where everyone has their own spin on it and does their own thing.

Often, but the key part here is I think the coffee and the bread, they almost all have that in common.

Cup soup is another name for it.

And then, like I said earlier, toddy is just kind of a name that means drink is definitely a thing in English.

So, Catherine, did you like it?

Do you have it now, or does it bring back memories?

Well, right now I’m doing kind of a recollection of my childhood visits to my grandparents.

I don’t know that I even ate it because I don’t think I would have liked coffee in the day because I would have been about five.

So I just remember them serving it up and like making it to me, it seemed like a big deal about it.

You know, like, oh, this is such a treat.

Yeah, well, I think Pennsylvanians have a lot of pride in that.

Thanks for sharing your memories with us, Catherine.

We appreciate it.

Well, thank you so much for letting me learn more about it.

Oh, yeah.

Appreciate it.

You take care.

Thanks for calling.

You too.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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