Skip to main content
Drink

Boiled Coffee

A coffee beverage prepared by boiling coffee with eggs and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coffee and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,239 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald a granite-ware coffee pot.

  2. Wash the eggs, break them, and beat slightly.

  3. Dilute the eggs with half of the cold water.

Make the coffee

  1. Add crushed shells and mix with the coffee.

  2. Pour the mixture into the coffee pot.

  3. Add boiling water and stir thoroughly.

  4. Place the pot on the front of the range and boil for 3 minutes.

  5. Cover the spout with soft paper to retain aroma, then stir.

Clear and serve

  1. Pour some coffee into a cup to remove grounds from the spout.

  2. Return the coffee to the pot.

  3. Repeat the process.

  4. Add the remaining cold water to clear the coffee.

  5. Place the pot on the back of the range for 10 minutes without boiling.

  6. Serve with cream or milk and sugar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coffee
Provides the main flavor and body of the brew.
Eggs
Egg proteins coagulate as they heat, trapping fine grounds so they can be removed.
Cold water
Dilutes the egg mixture so it spreads evenly, and clears the finished coffee.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor from the coffee grounds as it steeps.

The step that matters

Holding the coffee just below boiling. The egg proteins bind the grounds into clumps that sink while the coffee rests off the boil. Boiling again would stir the clumps back up and leave the coffee cloudy.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesEgg CoffeeEgg Coffee20 recipesCoffee MilkCoffee Milk12 recipesPostum CoffeePostum Coffee9 recipes