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 ↓
Boiled Coffee
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Scald a graniteware coffee pot.
Wash the egg, break it, and beat it slightly.
Dilute the egg with ½ cup of cold water, add crushed shell, and mix with the coffee.
Brew
Pour the mixture into the coffee pot and add boiling water, stirring thoroughly.
Place the pot on the fire and boil for 3 minutes.
Stuff the spout of the coffee pot with soft paper to retain aroma.
Add the remaining water and let it stand for 10 minutes on the back of the range.
Store leftovers
Use leftover coffee if poured off the grounds immediately and keep it in a cool place until needed.
Never reheat coffee on the grounds.
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.
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Coffee + eggtop 29% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Coffee
- Provides the main flavour and aroma of the drink.
- Egg
- Its white and shell bind fine grounds so they settle, leaving the coffee clearer.
The step that matters
Place the pot on the fire and boil for 3 minutes. Boiling the egg-coffee mixture briefly lets the egg proteins coagulate and collect the grounds. Boiling too long or too hard can over-extract bitterness, so keep the timing controlled.
“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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