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Dessert

Coffee Parfait

A chilled dessert made with coffee, sugar, eggs, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Coffee Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the hot coffee and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Stir the mixture into the slightly beaten egg yolks.

Add the whites and cream

  1. Fold the mixture into the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Whip the cream until stiff and add it to the mixture.

Mold and chill

  1. Mold the mixture, pack it in salt and ice, and let it stand for 3 hours.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Coffee + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,339 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Coffee
Provides the main flavor and liquid for the sweetened base.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and dissolves into the hot coffee to help balance its bitterness.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and thicken the base, while whipped whites add airy structure.
Cream
Whipped cream adds fat and richness, giving the parfait a light, smooth texture.

The step that matters

Folding the mixture into the egg whites. Egg whites hold air only while they are stiffly beaten. Stirring hard or too long deflates them, which makes the parfait dense instead of light.

“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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