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
serves 100Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Grind the coffee.
Mix the ground coffee 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.
Boil for 2 hours.
Five to ten minutes before serving, raise the lid.
Add 1 or 2 more sacks.
If serving multiple times, add fresh sacks at regular intervals.
Remove the first sacks.
Refill 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 flavor and aroma that the water extracts through the sacks.
- Eggs
- Bind to the coffee grounds and help them settle, clarifying the brewed liquid.
- Boiling water
- Extracts flavor from the coffee as it steeps in the sacks over the boiling period.
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 sacks are packed full, they can burst or be unable to release flavor evenly, so loose filling keeps extraction consistent.
“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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