Skip to main content
Drink

Coffee and Tea

A beverage made by boiling coffee with raw egg white and shell, then adding cold water and serving with milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 and Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee

  1. In a bowl, combine the coffee with ½ cup of cold water.

  2. Add the white and shell of the raw egg, then transfer to a clean coffee boiler.

  3. Shake the coffee boiler up and down hard six times.

  4. Pour in the boiling water and let it boil hard for 20 minutes.

  5. After 20 minutes, pour in ⅓ cup of cold water to stop the boil.

  6. Let it stand for 3 minutes to settle, then pour off gently into a serving pot.

Serve

  1. Scald the milk to serve with the coffee, or use rich cream.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. 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

Freshly-ground coffee
Provides the main coffee flavor and body of the brew.
Raw egg
Its white and shell bind fine grounds so they settle, leaving the coffee clear.
Milk or rich cream
Adds richness and softens the coffee's bitterness when served.

The step that matters

Pour in the cold water to stop the boil after 20 minutes. Adding cold water halts boiling so the grounds can settle. Letting it boil too long or skipping the cold water can over-extract bitterness and leave the brew cloudy.

“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 recipesCoffee MilkCoffee Milk12 recipesPostum CoffeePostum Coffee9 recipesBreakfast CoffeeBreakfast Coffee9 recipes