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Drink

Boiled Coffee

A beverage made by boiling coffee with egg and water, then cooling and serving with milk, cream, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

Make the coffee

  1. Mix coffee, egg, and 1/2 cup cold water in a pot.

  2. Add 6 cups of boiling water and boil hard for 5 minutes.

  3. Remove from heat and add the remaining 1/2 cup cold water.

  4. Let it stand for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with hot milk, cream, and 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 + 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 drink.
Egg
Its proteins bind to the grounds and help clarify the liquid as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil hard for 5 minutes. Boiling the coffee with the egg lets the egg proteins coagulate and gather the grounds. A gentle simmer or too short a boil leaves the coffee cloudy and gritty.

“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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