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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with egg white, eggshell, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brew

  1. Mix the egg white, small piece of eggshell, 1 tablespoon of cold water, and ground coffee together.

  2. Add the boiling water and boil for 3 minutes, then remove from heat.

Settle and serve

  1. Add the remaining cold water.

  2. Pour out a small quantity of coffee to return it to the pot.

  3. Let it stand for 2 minutes to settle.

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 + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,239 recipes

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

  2. Egg + snailtop 42% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together18 recipes
  3. Coffee + snailtop 48% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground coffee
Provides the main flavor, extracted into the hot water.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate and trap fine grounds, clearing the brew.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor from the grounds and heats the brew.

The step that matters

Remove from heat after boiling. Boiling for the full 3 minutes and then taking the pot off the heat controls extraction. Keeping it boiling longer can make the coffee bitter and can stop the egg white from settling the grounds cleanly.

“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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