Skip to main content
Drink

White Coffee

A hot beverage made by steeping unground coffee with boiling water and milk, served with sugar.

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 ↓

White Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee

  1. Put the coffee into a clean stew-pan over moderate heat.

  2. Warm the coffee through, shaking the pan for half a minute until very hot.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the coffee and cover the pan.

  4. Let it infuse by the side of the fire for fifteen minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the boiling hot milk and pass the coffee through a fine sieve into a coffee pot or jug.

  2. Serve with white sugar-candy or crystallised sugar.

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

Unground coffee
Provides the main coffee flavour, which is extracted slowly by steeping in hot water.
Boiling hot milk
Adds richness and softens the bitterness of the coffee.
White sugar-candy or crystallised sugar
Adds sweetness to taste when served.

The step that matters

Infusing the coffee. Steeping the coffee in boiling water for the full fifteen minutes draws out its flavour. Covering the pan keeps heat and aroma in, so the coffee extracts evenly and does not taste weak or flat.

“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.

More white coffee recipes

Egg 8

You might also like

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