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Drink

Coffee

A coffee beverage made by mixing dry coffee with an egg, boiling, adding cold water, and serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Coffee

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

Ingredients

Directions

Brew

  1. Mix the coffee and egg together in a pot.

  2. Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

Settle and serve

  1. Add ½ cup of cold water.

  2. Pour the coffee into a cup.

  3. Pour the coffee back into the pot.

  4. Let it stand for a few minutes 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Coffee
Supplies the flavor compounds that are extracted into the hot water.
Egg
Its proteins set during boiling, trapping fine grounds so the coffee comes out clearer.

The step that matters

Boil for 10 minutes.. The egg proteins must set and bind the grounds during boiling for the coffee to clarify. Boiling much longer can over-extract the coffee, making it bitter.

“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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