Name: Making Coffee
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon coffee powder per cup; boiling water; boiling milk; sugar to taste

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 ↓

Making Coffee

Ingredients

1 tablespoon coffee powder per cup
boiling water
boiling milk
sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare the coffee

Roast coffee beans in an enamelled frying pan over a mild fire until rich brown, stirring constantly.
For each cup of coffee, use 1 tablespoon of coffee powder and pour ½ cup of boiling water over it.
Let the coffee steep for 30 minutes, then strain through a linen or cotton bag into a coffee pot.

Serve

To serve, mix ¼ cup of coffee with ¾ cup of boiling milk and add sugar 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.

Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,202 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,344 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Coffee powder: Provides the main coffee flavour and aroma once steeped in hot water.
Boiling milk: Adds richness and softens the bitterness of the coffee.

“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.