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Dessert

Coffee Filling

A sweet coffee-based filling made with sugar, coffee, and whipped egg whites, optionally with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Coffee and nuts work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Coffee Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil sugar and coffee in a saucepan without stirring until it reaches a hair-like consistency.

  2. Slowly pour the mixture into the stiffly whipped egg whites while beating continuously.

Finish

  1. Spread the mixture and add chopped nuts if desired.

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 + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Sugar + coffeetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Egg + nutstop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,624 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves and cooks to a syrup that sets into the filling's sweet, firm body.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that gives the filling its light, airy structure.
Strong coffee
Adds coffee flavour and a little liquid to the cooked sugar syrup.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the whites. Pour the syrup slowly while beating continuously. Adding it too fast or without beating can deflate the whipped egg whites and prevent a smooth, stable filling.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, coffee, egg):

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Hazelnutfits about as well
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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