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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with egg white and crushed eggshell, then cooling with cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Make the coffee

  1. Put the ground coffee into a pot.

  2. Pour boiling water over the coffee and bring it to a boil.

Clarify and serve

  1. Remove from heat and stir in the slightly beaten egg white and crushed eggshell.

  2. Return to heat and boil for 1 minute.

  3. Pour 1 tablespoon of cold water down the spout.

  4. Let the pot sit still for 5 minutes.

  5. Carefully pour off the liquid coffee.

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 + 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 coffee flavour and aroma that the brew extracts into the water.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate as they heat, trapping fine grounds so the coffee runs clearer.
Crushed eggshell
Adds calcium-rich particles that help gather the grounds and clarify the liquid.

The step that matters

Let the pot sit still before pouring. Once the egg white has set around the grounds, the mass needs time to settle undisturbed. Moving or stirring the pot early can break it up and cloud the coffee.

“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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