Cortado is the past participle of the Spanish verb cortar, to cut. In Spain the drink is espresso cut with a roughly equal amount of warm, steamed milk that is not frothy, meant to tame the coffee’s acidity rather than put on a show. Order a café solo corto and you get a short black; order a café cortado and you are asking for that splash of flat milk. In Cuba, where fresh milk and refrigeration were often out of reach, the idea became the cortadito, made with heated sweetened condensed milk, and Cuban Americans carried it to the ventanitas of Miami’s Little Havana in the 1960s.

The cortado travels under many names: tallat in Catalonia, ebaki in the Basque Country, and pingado or garoto in Portugal, where harsher beans from the colonies needed only a drop of milk. It differs from a flat white not in ratio but in texture, since the flat white’s microfoam traps air and changes how the drink feels. In early 2000s San Francisco, Blue Bottle and Ritual named a version after the Libby Gibraltar glass, a thick 4.5 ounce tumbler that sets the recipe.

• The Cuban leche y leche adds a layer of cream on top of condensed milk and espresso.
• A cortadito differs from a cafecito, where sugar is whipped into the first drops of espresso to make espumita.
• Costa Coffee in the Czech Republic trademarked the name corto classic.
• Australia’s piccolo latte is a ristretto topped with microfoam, and Portugal’s galão uses a 1 to 3 ratio in a tall glass.
• A Gibraltar is 2 ounces of double espresso plus 2.5 ounces of steamed milk, and the heavy glass cools it quickly.