Skip to main content
Drink

Coffee with Milk

A drink made by brewing coffee with water, adding milk, sweetening, warming, and frothing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coffee and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,202 recipes. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

Coffee with Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee

  1. Prepare coffee using 4 ounces of coffee to 1 quart of water (or 6 ounces for a richer flavor).

  2. Add an equal amount of milk to the coffee.

Sweeten and froth

  1. Sweeten to taste.

  2. Warm the mixture without boiling.

  3. Pour from a height to froth the coffee as you would a foaming liquid.

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 + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,344 recipes

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Clear coffee
Provides the main bitter, aromatic flavor base of the drink.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the coffee's bitterness, and its proteins help it froth.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the coffee's bitterness.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture without boiling. Milk can scorch on the bottom of the pan or boil over when overheated. Scorching gives a burnt flavor, and overheated milk develops a skin and loses its smooth texture.

“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.

You might also like

Brown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesEgg CoffeeEgg Coffee20 recipesCoffee MilkCoffee Milk12 recipesPostum CoffeePostum Coffee9 recipes