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 ↓
Coffee for One Hundred
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Grind the coffee and mix it with the eggs.
Make small muslin sacks.
Place 1 pint of the coffee mixture in each sack, leaving room for it to swell.
Brew
Add 5 gallons of boiling water to a large coffee urn or boiler with a faucet at the bottom.
Put some of the sacks into the urn and boil for 2 hours.
5 to 10 minutes before serving, raise the lid and add 1 or 2 more sacks.
Continue adding fresh sacks at regular intervals, removing the first ones and refilling with boiling water as needed.
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
- Roasted coffee
- Provides the main coffee flavour and body of the brew.
- Eggs
- Bind the grounds so they settle and help clarify the brewed coffee.
The step that matters
Leave room in each sack for the coffee to swell. Ground coffee absorbs water and expands as it brews. If the muslin sack is packed full, the grounds cannot swell freely, the bag can burst or tear, and the extraction becomes uneven.
“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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