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Coffee for Five Persons

A coffee beverage made by mixing ground beans with beaten egg and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and beans work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 289 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Coffee for Five Persons

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat half an egg with two tablespoons of cold water.

  2. Grind the coffee beans and mix with the beaten egg, ensuring all grounds are wet.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the coffee mixture.

  4. Boil for about ten minutes after it comes to a boil.

  5. Use all the water required at once; do not add water later.

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 + beanstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  3. Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Coffee beans
Provide the coffee flavour and body that the brewed drink is built on.
Egg
Its proteins bind to the grounds, helping them settle so the brew clears.

The step that matters

Use all the water at once. Adding water later disturbs the egg and grounds that are settling together. Keeping the brew undisturbed lets the egg clarify the coffee, so the result stays clear rather than cloudy.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, egg):

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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