Some food holidays are annoying. National Cheese Doodle Day (March 5) seems superfluous. If you’re the sort of person who eats those unnaturally orange snacks, you don’t need a holiday to remind you to consume them. Ditto National Glazed Doughnut Day (Jan. 12).

Some food holidays are just plain wrong. National Rhubarb Pie Day is Jan. 23. This makes absolutely no sense. The only way to get rhubarb in January, at least here in the northern hemisphere, is to purchase it frozen. This method is expensive because it necessitates overnight shipping. I’d like to go on record to suggest that National Rhubarb Pie Day (or perhaps National Rhubarb Day; rhubarb is so versatile it’s hard to restrict it to pie) should immediately move to late May or June.

Those of us with rhubarb patches can of course avoid paying for frozen rhubarb in winter by freezing part of our own crop. My frozen rhubarb is usually history by January, however. I love rhubarb too much to keep it in the freezer for more than a few months.

Despite the above mentioned inappropriate holidays, every once in a while the food-holiday gods nail the perfect date. I was overjoyed last week when I discovered that this Friday, July 26, is National Coffee Milkshake Day … or as we call it here in New England, National Coffee Frappe Day.

I tend to use the terms “milkshake” and “frappe” interchangeably. My mother had New England roots, while my father had mid-Atlantic ones. I grew up loving both frappes and milkshakes and thinking of the words as synonyms.

With our recent warm weather, all ice-cream treats are welcome. I have a special place in my heart for a milkshake/frappe, however. It’s cool. It’s filling. It soothingly slides down a parched throat.

And coffee frappes are my favorite frappes. I don’t care for plain coffee as a beverage. Add enough sugar and dairy, however, and I adore the stuff. The jolt of caffeine and the contrast between the tart coffee and the creamy dairy are unmatched.

I try to ration myself by only drinking one or two of these coffee treats a summer. My mother used to recall going on a frappe diet in college. She said she consumed nothing but frappes for two weeks and lost quite a bit of weight.

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I respected my mother, who was a force to be reckoned with, but I never quite believed that story. According to Friendly’s, its coffee Fribble weighs in at 630 calories. Eat too many Fribbles, and you’re not losing weight.

Eat one Fribble — or one coffee milkshake, or one coffee frappe (all the same thing) — and you have a meal fit for a queen or king. It’s the quintessential summer treat. (By the way, as I was scanning the internet for this article, I learned that the Fribble was originally called the Awful Awful. I’m beyond glad that Friendly’s changed the name. ”Fribble” is light and frothy and fun, as a milkshake should be. I can’t imagine walking into a restaurant and asking for an Awful Awful.)

Sadly, humans haven’t always been able to enjoy milkshakes. According to the Dairy Alliance, a trade group that advocates for dairy “as an essential ingredient to life” (it took the words out of my dairy-loving mouth), the earliest milkshakes, in the 1880s, were combinations of cream, eggs, and alcohol.

In the early 1900s, the alcohol was eliminated, and milkshakes were made with flavored syrups and malted milk. The invention of the electric blender helped pave the path for the milkshake of today, supposedly invented by an ice-cream oriented Walgreen’s employee named Ivar “Pop” Coulson in 1922.

In those days, almost all drugstores had soda fountains, where pharmacists mixed up healthful (or merely delicious) concoctions for their customers.

This phenomenon has largely died out, but we are lucky here in Franklin County. We can still find a drugstore soda fountain in Shelburne Falls, where the Baker Pharmacy still serves up sodas, cones, and sundaes … and of course frappes. If you have your own blender (as I do), you can make your own coffee concoction this Friday or any other day.

In preparing my own frappe, I considered boiling up some coffee syrup with sugar and coffee. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to turn on the stove. It was a hot day. Moreover, I didn’t feel that my shake needed extra sugar. I mixed espresso powder and milk into my creation instead of using syrup.

You may of course substitute strong coffee for the espresso powder and milk. Since I don’t drink coffee, I didn’t have any on hand. Chill your coffee before you add it to the milkshake, however, or you’ll melt your ice cream too soon.

Enjoy National Coffee Milkshake Day!

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon espresso powder (if using milk)

3 scoops coffee ice cream, slightly softened (Softening doesn’t take long in the summer.)

1/2 cup milk (or strong coffee if you have it), plus more as needed

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional but delicious)

a tiny bit of whipped cream (optional but decorative)

Instructions:

Place all the ingredients, except the whipped cream, in a blender in the order mentioned. Start with the 1/2 cup of milk or coffee. Blend the mixture to combine the ingredients. Turn off the blender to inspect your milkshake. If it is too solid, add a bit more milk or coffee and blend again.

Pour your shake into a festive glass, and top it with a little whipped cream if you wish. You may not have a straw in the house, but between sipping and spooning you should have no trouble consuming the frappe.

Serves 1.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.