In Singapore's coffee shops, the kopitiams, coffee is made from beans roasted dark with sugar and a little butter or margarine, brewed in a long cloth sock and poured from a height into thick china cups. It is ordered in a compact code: kopi comes with condensed milk, kopi O is black with sugar, kopi C uses evaporated milk, and adding peng makes any of them iced. Learn four words and you can order like a regular.

The roasting gives a toasty, almost chocolate bitterness, and the condensed milk turns it into something between a coffee and a dessert. On a race weekend it is breakfast with kaya toast, and the cure for a late night at the circuit.

The coffee

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons (24 g) Nanyang coffee powder
• 1 1/2 cups (360 ml) boiling water
• 3 to 4 tablespoons (60 to 80 g) sweetened condensed milk

Method

1. Spoon 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of condensed milk into the bottom of each warmed cup. Do not stir.
2. Put the coffee in the sock set inside the jug, or in the French press. Pour the boiling water over it and leave it to steep for 4 minutes.
3. If using a sock: lift it out, then pour the coffee from the jug back through the sock into a second jug or pan, two or three times, holding the jug a little higher each time. This aerates the coffee and gives it body. If using a French press: press the plunger slowly, then pour.
4. Pour the hot coffee over the condensed milk in each cup, then stir well from the bottom.

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