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Dessert

Coffee Dragees

A confection made by mixing powdered coffee with boiling water, sugar, and coffee extract, then forming into dragees.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,344 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Dragees

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee infusion

  1. Pour boiling water over the powdered coffee in a large vessel.

  2. Draw off one gallon of the coffee infusion.

Build up the dragees

  1. Melt sugar using the coffee infusion instead of water.

  2. Charge the dragees with coffee syrup until they reach the desired size.

  3. Place built-up dragees on boards with grated bottoms and let them stand until the next day.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Powdered coffee
Provides the coffee flavour and colour carried into the infusion.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that builds a hard, sweet shell around each dragee.
Coffee extract
Adds concentrated coffee flavour to the finished product.

The step that matters

Charging the dragees with coffee syrup. Each syrup layer must dry before the next is added, or the coating becomes sticky and uneven. Standing overnight lets the sugar layers harden and set firmly.

“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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