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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with salt, egg white, 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

  1. Mix the coffee, salt, egg white, and crushed shell.

  2. Add cold water and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a scalded coffee pot and add boiling water.

  4. Fill the spout with soft paper.

Boil and settle

  1. Boil very gently for 3 to 5 minutes, then set back.

  2. Pour out a little coffee to clear the spout. Return the spout to the pot.

  3. Let it stand for 3 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).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarsely ground coffee
Provides the main flavor and aroma, extracted into the hot water during boiling.
Egg white and shell
As it cooks, it coagulates and gathers fine grounds, helping the brewed coffee run clearer.

The step that matters

Boil very gently for 3 to 5 minutes. Boiling vigorously can churn the grounds back into the liquid and make the coffee cloudy and bitter. A gentle simmer lets the egg white clump and carry the grounds down 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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