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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with an egg and water, then served with milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,202 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Boiled Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of ground coffee per person plus one extra.

  2. Break and stir an egg into the coffee.

  3. Add the eggshell and fill the pot half full with boiling water.

Brew

  1. Boil for 3 minutes, then remove from heat.

  2. Pour out a cupful and return it to the pot.

  3. Add a little more boiling water and let it settle for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot milk or cream.

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 + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

  3. 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

Ground coffee
Provides the main flavour and aroma, extracted into the boiling water.
Egg
As it cooks, it gathers the fine grounds so the coffee becomes clearer.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 minutes, then remove from heat. Once the egg has set around the grounds, the pot must come off the heat. Continued boiling over-extracts bitter compounds and stirs up the grounds the egg is meant to trap.

“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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