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Drink

Count Rumford's Substitute for Tea and Coffee

A hot beverage made by cooking wheat or rye meal with butter, roasted meal, water, salt, pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,002 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Count Rumford's Substitute for Tea and Coffee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a clean iron frying pan.

  2. Sprinkle the meal into the melted butter and stir briskly with a wooden spoon until the meal is a uniform brown color. Be careful to prevent burning on the bottom of the pan.

Brew and season

  1. Boil ½ ounce of the roasted meal in 1 pint of water.

  2. Season the soup with salt, black pepper, and vinegar to taste.

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. Wheat + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Wheat + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together984 recipes

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

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat or rye meal
Provides the bulk of the drink and its roasted, toasty flavor once browned in butter.
Butter
Fat that coats the meal and helps it brown evenly during stirring.
Roasted meal
Steeped in water to extract color and roasted flavor for the brew.

The step that matters

Browning the meal in butter. Stirring constantly keeps the meal browning evenly. Scorched starch on the pan bottom turns bitter and gives the drink a burnt taste, so the color must be uniform, not dark in spots.

“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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