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Drink

To Make Coffee

A coffee brewed with egg white, shell, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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To Make Coffee

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 ↓

To Make Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the ground coffee, egg white, and shell in a pot.

  2. Add the cold water and mix thoroughly with a spoon.

  3. Pour in 1 cup of boiling water.

  4. Let it boil for 20 minutes.

  5. Add the remaining 1 cup of boiling water.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Egg
As the egg white heats it coagulates, trapping fine grounds and clarifying the brew.
Ground coffee
Supplies the main coffee flavour, aroma and body.

The step that matters

Boiling for 20 minutes. As the mixture heats, the egg white coagulates and gathers the fine grounds into a raft. Boiling long enough lets this set, so the coffee comes out clearer and less gritty.

“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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