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Drink

Old Fashioned Coffee

A coffee beverage made by mixing coffee, egg, and boiling water, then boiling and settling.

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 ↓

Old Fashioned Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scald the coffee pot.

  2. Mix the coffee with the egg and add boiling water.

  3. Allow it to boil three times, removing from the heat each time.

  4. Let it sit for a short time to settle before serving.

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. Egg + beanstop 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
Provides the main flavour and aroma of the drink.
Egg
Helps clarify the coffee by binding fine grounds as it settles.

The step that matters

Boiling three times, removing from the heat each time. Repeated boiling extracts flavour from the grounds, but letting it boil continuously can make the coffee bitter and cloudy. Lifting it off the heat between boils keeps the extraction controlled.

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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