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Drink

Vienna Coffee

Vienna Coffee is a coffee beverage topped with whipped cream or a whipped egg white mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Vienna Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cream

  1. Whip the cream until stiff and sweeten with powdered sugar. Set aside in a small bowl.

Make the coffee

  1. Prepare a quart of café-au-lait, sweetening it with loaf sugar as desired.

Assemble and serve

  1. Top each cup of café-au-lait with whipped cream to cover the surface.

  2. Stir slightly from the bottom before drinking.

  3. If cream is unavailable, whip the egg whites lightly and mix with cold milk and sugar.

  4. Use this mixture as a topping for the café-au-lait.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Rich cream
Whipped into stiff foam that forms the rich, airy topping over the coffee.
Egg whites
Whipped lightly to form a foam that can replace the cream as a topping.
Café-au-lait
Forms the hot coffee base that the sweetened topping sits on.

The step that matters

Whipping the cream until stiff. Cream must be whipped until it holds its shape so it floats on the hot coffee as a topping rather than melting into it. Overwhipping can turn cream grainy, while underwhipping leaves it runny.

“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.

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